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WAR OF THE METALS 



WASHINGTONIANA. 



MEXICO, HAWAII AND JAPAN 



By Theodore W. Noyes, 

President of the Washington Board of Trade. 



0C1 23 WW 



Washington, D. C. : 
Tnos. W. Cadick, Printer 

1899. 



CONTENTS. 



CURIOUS PHASES OF THE WAR OF METALS. Page. 

Free Coinage Magic 2 

Curiosities of Repudiation G 

Demonetization of Wampum, or the Crime of 1661 11 

Shy lock Workmen and True National Greatness 16 

WASHINGTON1ANA. 

Speech at Board of Trade Reception, February 20, 1894 21 

Speech as President of the Washington Board of Trade, at the 
Board's Annual Reception, at the Arlington, February 24, 
1898 24 

Speech as President of the Washington Board of Trade, at the 

Board's Annual Shad Bake, at Marsnall Hall, May 21, 1898 29 

Speech as President of the Washington Board of Trade, at the 
Annual Reception, February 23, 1899 34 

Speech as President of the Washington Board of Trade, at the 
Annual Shad Bake, May 6, 1899 39 

Report as Chairman of the Committee on Public Library, of 
the Washington Board of Trade, March 27, 1894, and brief 
sketch of the origiu and development of the Washington 
Public Library 44 

NOTES OF TRAVEL IX MEXICO, HAWAII, AND JAPAN. 

Mexico's Wonders 56 

Aztec and Spaniard 65 

Modern Mexico 73 

A King Among Trees 82 

Mitla's Ruins 91 

Nikko's Great Day '. 101 

Japanese Jingoism. 115 

Japan and Hawaii 126 

Hawaii's Crisis 142 



CURIOUS PHASES OF THE WAR OF METALS. 



The free-silver oracle speaks through a double-headed idol 
3ike the god Janus of Roman mythology. One head faces 
the mining camps of the Rocky Mountains; the other over- 
looks the farms of the Middle West and South. Through its 
two sets of lips the oracle speaks with contradictory 
tongues. To the silver owner in the Rockies, directly and 
specifically, and indirectly to frightened creditors every- 
where, it proclaims: "Independent free coinage at 16 to 1 
will double the market price of silver over all the world and 
enrich the bullion owner without cheating anyone else!" To 
farmers and to debtors it declares: "Free coinage will not 
double the world price of silver, but by substituting for the 
gold dollar a depreciated and depreciating silver dollar, it 
will raise prices for the benefit of the farmer, and by cheap- 
ening money it will render easier the payment of debts!" 

Through one head the oracle predicts an impossibility to 
deceive and conciliate the honest, and through the other it 
proclaims the truth in a shape to tempt the dishonest. The 
end is held to justify the means in making converts to the 
religion of free silver and in swelling the throng of worship- 
ers before the double-headed idol. 

If the declaration that free coinage here would raise the 
price of silver to $1.29 per ounce over all the world were? 
taken seriously and generally believed, the silver shrine 
would be promptly abandoned by the great mass of its de- 
votees. Such belief might prevent honest men from utterly 
destroying in righteous indignation the abhorrent image, 
but. on the other hand, it would rob the idol of attractive- 
ness, except for the silver owner, and leave him almost a 
solitary worshiper at a deserted altar. 



FREE-COINAGE MAGIC. 



Jugglery by Which Silver Is to Be Doubled in Value— 
The Midas Touch of Uncle Sam— Why Confine the 
Wonder -Working Power to the White Metal? — 
Some Suggestive Questions. 

[The Washington Star, Oct. 28, lS9ii.] 

If independent free coinage at 1G to 1 will, as Mr. Bryan 
insists, permanently double the value of silver over all the 
world, a single legislative act, performed on Capitol Hill, will 
cause instantaneously the Mexican dollar to buy twice as 
much as it now does, not only in this country, but in London 
and Paris also. The Indian rupee will buy twice as much as 
at present, not only in Bombay and London, but in St. 
Petersburg. The vast deposits of silver in the mines of Mex- 
ico will be instantly doubled in value. The national debt 
of Mexico, payable in gold, will be in effect cut in half be- 
cause the Mexican silver in which it is to be paid has ap- 
proached by that much nearer to the value of gold. Without 
inconvenience to ourselves we will have caused the hoarded 
silver of the Mexicans, the Hindoos and 400,000,000 China- 
men, though buried in the earth, to know 100 per cent, of in- 
crease. Every piece of silver in the world, in ore, bullion, 
ornament or coin, will feel the magic influence of our value- 
expanding edict, and at the Midas touch of Lncle Sam will 
assume a double share of the characteristics of gold. 

If we thus have power to work miracles and to spread 
comparative opulence among the humble homes of more 
than half the people of the world, the question arises, why 
should we limit our beneficence to the extent of merely 
doubling the wealth of (he silver Hindoo, Chinaman or Mexi- 
can, by fixing the coinage ratio at 10 to 1? If we can double 
the world's market value of silver, we can quadruple if, or 
multiply it by eight or by sixteen. There is no reason why 
we should be wedded lo the ratio of 16 to 1. It does not 
appear that precisely this coinage ratio ever prevailed in any 
country in any ago of the world. The "money of the Consti- 
tution" is sometimes misleadingly referred to, but the first 
coinage ratio under the Constitution was 15 to 1, and it was 
also the carefullv estimated commercial ratio, on which 



basis the constitutional ratio would be about 31 to 1 at 
the present day. We are told that in early Bible times sil- 
ver was treated as equal in value to gold, the ratio being 1 
to 1. Why not restore the money and ratio and parity of 
the Bible rather than the alleged ratio of the Constitution, 
thus giving to silver its scriptural value before even the most 
ancient of the European gold bugs began their fiendish work 
of appreciating gold at the expense of silver, and thus bless- 
ing the silver owner, small or great, of Mexico, India, China 
and all the world by increasing sixteen fold his metal's pur- 
chasing and debt-paying power? 

TURNING SILVER INTO GOLD. 

If Uncle Sam is to play King Midas he will appropriately 
enact the part in a truly royal style. He will certainly not 
be content with a beggarly appreciation of silver to the ratio 
of 16 to 1, and will undoubtedly at the very least convert all 
the silver outright into gold at the ratio of 1 to 1, even if he 
finds himself able to confine his magic touch to silver and 
ro refrain from changing our wheat, corn and potatoes into 
gold. 

There are still other ratios which might find advocates. 
There is the Columbian ratio of 10J to 1, which prevailed 
at the time of the discovery of America, and which may per- 
haps be entitled to consideration as the original American 
ratio. Outside of this sentimental consideration it is to be 
urged in favor of this ratio that the resulting dollar will be 
most convenient in size and weight for use. The 16 to 1 dol- 
lar is too bulky for popular use. A 31 to 1 dollar at the 
present commercial ratio would be unendurable. A 1 to 1 
dollar, of the size and weight of the gold dollar, would be too 
small, though it is probably selfish to take into account this 
detail, when the blessings are considered which we are to 
shower under this ratio upon the world at large. A lOf to 
1 dollar, the true Columbian dollar, would be a little larger 
than the present half dollar, making a very convenient coin 
for popular use. 

If we can raise the value of silver over all the world to any 
increased price for it that we announce as to be paid at our 
mints, then most assuredly we should adopt for the world 
the Bible ratio of 1 to 1 with all the powerful arguments in 
its favor, or the Columbian ratio of 10 J to 1 with sentimental 
considerations and a convenient coinage size and weight to 
plead for it. 



The question arises, however, when we find that we can 
with impunity disregard scornfully the world price of silver 
and by legislative act fasten a new price for silver upon 
all the nations of a tributary earth, why should we confine 
our price-fixing power to silver? Why should we not ex- 
tend it to some commodity of which individual Americans 
produce more and which they more generally possess? If 
by an act of legislation we can double the world price of sil- 
ver, why not likewise, by Congressional enactment, double 
the world value of wheat, corn and cotton? 

If the world price of silver is increased by free coinage to 
fl.29 per ounce, as Mr. Bryan promises, the mine owner will 
pocket an additional profit of 64 cents on every ounce mined, 
an annual minimum gain to existing American mine opera- 
tors alone of over $35,000,000. 

DOUBLING SILVEE'S PEICE ON OURSELVES. 

The theory advanced by Mr. Bryan, which maintains that 
by free coinage here silver will be doubled in price over all 
the world, treats free coinage as a purchase of the silver by 
the Government for a fixed price at the mints. You and I 
and all the other taxpayers of the United States supply the 
money which is to be thus expended, and the question arises, 
why should we who produce and own no silver double the 
price of silver upon ourselves when we wish to buy? How 
does it benefit us who do not sell silver to have it cost more? 
Why should we take this $35,000,000 from our national tax 
money — already insufficient to supply our current needs — 
and hand it over voluntarily and unnecessarily to the silver 
owners, who make a handsome profit now in selling their 
silver for one-half of what we insist upon paying them here- 
after? 

Under the Sherman act we bought silver to be coined into 
money. How did that business operation differ from .Mr. 
Bryan's proposed purchase? 

We paid under the former only the commercial value of 
the silver; under the latter it is proposed that we double the 
price. Uuder the former the coinage was limited with the 
purpose of confining it to American silver or to an amount 
which could be maintained at a parity with gold; under the 
latter coinage would be unlimited. Under the former the 
coinage was on the Government's account, all taxpayers 
profiting by the difference between the commercial and the 
coinage value of the silver; under the latter the coinage 



would be on individual account and the profit or seigniorage 
goes to the silver owner instead of to the nation, the aggre- 
gated taxpayers. 

If we are not satisfied with our experiments under the 
Bland and Sherman acts, and wish to add more silver dollars 
to our currency than can be supplied from the millions of 
silver bullion already bought and lying in the Treasury 
vaults, why not buy the bullion for ourselves and earn for 
ourselves the seigniorage? Why insist upon enriching the 
silver-owning class at the expense of the masses, the taxpay- 
ers of the United States? 

Is American shrewdness at striking a bargain totally lost? 
If we are going to offer to buy the four billions of silver of 
the world, why do we offer to pay twice what we can now get 
it for in the world's markets, and defend ourselves solely by 
saying that it will be worth the double price just as soon as 
we offer to paj* that amount for it? 

For Uncle Sam to make an extravagant guess at the price 
which silver will bring after he has "remonetized" it, and 
then insist upon paying that double price for it now, and to 
offer to buy all there is in the Avorld at that price, when he 
can get all he wants for half of that price, is to entitle him- 
self to a dunce's cap of the very largest size. 

But the role which Uncle Sam is really expected to fill is 
not that of fool, but knave. Independent free coinage will 
array him not in the cap and bells, but in the striped suit of 
a convict in the court of nations. For the overwhelming 
majority of the 16 to 1 advocates accept the truth that free 
coinage will not double permanently the world price of sil- 
ver, but by depreciating the dollar will raise prices and ren- 
der easier the payment of debts. 

All financial experience suggests that under free coinage 
there would be enough temporary rise in the price of silver 
to bring great gains to silver owners, especially to specula- 
tors, to the money handlers and money changers, to "a class 
at the expense of the masses, v and a sufficiently speedy de- 
cline to cheat creditors for the benefit of debtors and to ex- 
pose the nation to all the evils of a depreciated and depre- 
ciating currency. 



THE DEBTORS' CHANCE. 



Curious Phases of the Problem of Repudiation— Effect 
of Changing Ratios — Taking Revenge in 1896 for 
the "Crime of 1873"— The Wolf and the Lamb. 

[The Washington Star, Oct. 29, 1896.] 

Independent free coinage at 16 to 1 would benefit debtors 
only by swindling creditors. Every man to whom a dollar 
is now due would be compelled to accept for it one-half of 
that amount. American debtors, including the nation itself, 
would go into fraudulent bankruptcy at fifty cents on the 
dollar or thereabouts, indelibly staining the credit of the 
nation and that of every debtor in it. 

The charge of dishonesty in free coinage at 16 to 1 is met 
by the allegation that the gold standard dollar has appre- 
ciated since 1873 until it is now a 200-cent dollar and needs 
depreciation itself by one-half to be rendered honest. 

The theory of gold appreciation has been thoroughly dis- 
cussed in the campaign, and in the opinion of the sound- 
money men has been exploded. But there is another branch 
of the discussion on this point which has not been so fully 
or so satisfactorily explored. 

If it were possible to demonstrate that gold had appre- 
ciated, as alleged, this demonstration would not suffice to 
prove that the half-value silver dollar under unlimited free 
coinage at 16 to 1 would be an honest coin. 

If debtors have been gradually robbed for more than 
twenty years by a dollar appreciating slightly though with 
fluctuations from year to year, the evil and crime are not to 
be remedied by wholesale robbery of the creditors of to-day, 
by a sudden and large depreciation of that dollar. One 
crime does not justify another. There is no retributive jus- 
tice in the crime, since the persons to be robbed to-day are 
not the robbers of the last twenty years. 

Because A, a debtor of fifteen or ten years ago, was swin- 
dled to an almost inappreciable amount through gradually 
appreciating money, therefore B, a creditor of to-day, should 
be swindled out of 47 per cent, of his due by a sudden depre- 
ciation of the money in which he is paid. This is the silver 
view of compensation. All creditors are grouped together 



and all debtors are grouped together without regard to the 
years in which they lived and are arrayed against each other 
like the Indians and white men of old times on the frontier. 
[f a white man killed an Indian, the Indians would, in retali- 
ation, kill the tirst white man whom they met. The creditors 
of to-day are to be robbed 47 per cent, because the debtors of 
the 70s and '80s may have been robbed 2 or 3 per cent., 
though the debtors of the 70s who suffered this small rob- 
bery are in many instances the creditors of the '90s whom it 
is proposed to plunder of half their due in retaliation for the 
previous robbery committed in part upon themselves. They 
are thus plundered both going and coming. 

A debtor vendetta is declared against all creditors, lasting 
from generation to generation, without regard to individual 
changes in the composition of the two classes, or even of 
changes in the course of years from one class to the other. 

THE CURE FOR APPRECIATION. 

The cure for the evils of a fluctuating, appreciating money 
is not to substitute a depreciated fluctuating money, but a 
steady, unfluctuating currency, neither appreciating nor de- 
preciating. Any swindle perpetrated upon the debtors of 
1873 is not satisfied by swindling the creditors of 1896. The 
statute of limitations has probably run against the previous 
swindle. In any event, we cannot show our abhorrence of 
an old rascality by resorting to a new one. The dubious and 
infinitesimal crime of 1873 does not justify the vast proposed 
crime of 1896. Nor would the one justify the other if that 
of 1873 were the greater. 

To cure the alleged evils of an appreciating money of 
twenty years' development we are asked to endure the cer- 
tain evils of a depreciated and depreciating money to-day. 
Discarding as unreliable a constantly lengthening financial 
yard-stick, shall we substitute instead of a stable measure, 
one that is constantly shortening? The evil of a changing 
money standard is not to be remedied on the homeopathic 
principle that like cures like. It is only in the nursery 
rhymes dedicated to Mother Goose and other members of 
the Goose family that the wise man who has scratched out 
his eyes by jumping into a bramble bush conceives the 
brilliant idea of jumping into another bush in order to 
scratch them in again. 

If on account of the imagined mysterious affinity between 
the price of silver and all of the commodities except gold the 



apparent depreciation of silver is really an appreciation of 
gold, and the gold dollar has been appreciating in value since 
1873 until now it is a 200-cent dollar and needs to be cut in 
two in order to enable a debtor to pay equitably a debt con- 
tracted in 1S73, it is evident that this depreciation of the 
dollar is just only in the case of the creditor of 1873. The 
debtor of no other year has had each dollar of his debt 
doubled upon him. The number of debts still existing which 
were contracted in 1873 or in the adjacent years, when on the 
silverites' theory our dollar was worth approximately 100 
cents, is infinitesimal, and they are nearly all corporation 
indebtednesses, railroad, governmental and municipal, due 
from wealthy and powerful debtors, whose credit was strong 
enough to maintain long-sustained indebtedness, and who 
made such profitable use of the borrowed money that they 
might be supposed able to pay the extra interest or bonus 
represented by the alleged appreciation of the dollar of pay- 
ment. Against the debtors of 1873 and thereabouts (not one 
per cent, of the entire number of debtors) who will be justly 
treated by depreciation of the dollar to fifty cents, if gold 
has really done all the fluctuating, are to be placed all other 
creditors than those who loaned in 1873 or thereabouts, who 
will be swindled in a constantly increasing amount as the 
date of their loans approaches the present day. Statistics 
show that the bulk of existing debts not yet due were con- 
tracted within the year, and that only the most insignificant 
fraction is older than five years, which is the maximum 
limit of western real estate mortgages. 

RESULT OF FLUCTUATING RATIOS. 

The assumption that silver has remained uniform in value, 
and that our gold dollar has done all the fluctuating, works 
out some curious results, if accepted. It is not always the 
debtors who have been defrauded even on this theory. The 
depreciation of silver or the appreciation of gold has not 
been continuous. Debtors who obtained loans in -SG, '87, 
'88 and '89 and paid in 1800, for instance, paid in cheaper 
dollars than they gave, and defrauded their creditors, in- 
stead of being defrauded. The ratio of silver to gold in 18S6 
was 20.78 to 1; in '87, 21.13; in '88, 21.90; in '89, 22,10, and 
in 1890, 19.70. 

The depreciation of silver in the silver dollar represents 
the alleged appreciation of the gold dollar. The silver dol- 



9 

lar has not depreciated nor the gold dollar appreciated con 
tinnously since 1873. 

Debtors who borrowed in 1876 paid in 1877 in a cheaper 
dollar than they received. Silver appreciated or gold de- 
preciated in those years. 

Commercial ratio of silver Bullion value of silver 
to sold. dollar. 

1876—17.88 to 1 .S94 

1877—17.22 to 1 .929 

Those who borrowed in 1879 and paid in 1880 paid back 
a cheaper dollar than they received. 

Commercial ratio. Bullion value of silver 

dollar. 
1879—18.40 to 1 .86S 

1880—18.05 to 1 .886 

Those who borrowed in 1883 and paid in 1884 paid back a 
cheaper dollar than they received. 

Commercial ratio. Bullion value of silver 

dollar. 
1883—18.<J4 to 1 .858 

1881—18.57 to 1 .801 

Those who borrowed in '86. '87, '88 or '89 and paid in 1890 
paid in a cheaper dollar than they borrowed. 

Commercial ratio. Bullion value of silver 

dollar. 

1886—20.78 to 1 .769 

1887—21.13 to 1 .758 

18S8— 21.99 to 1 .727 

1889—22.10 to 1 .724 

1S90— 19.76 to 1 .810 

Those who borrowed in '87, '88 and "89 and paid in '91 paid 
in a cheaper dollar. 

Commercial ratio. Bullion value of silver 

dollar. 
1887—21.13 to 1 .758 

1888—21.99 to 1 .727 

1889—22.10 to 1 .724 

1891—20.92 to 1 .764 

Those who borrowed in '94 and paid in '95, or the first six 
months of '9(1, and those who borrowed in "95 and paid in the 



10 I 

first six months of '96, paid in cheaper money than the}' bor- 
rowed. 

Commercial ratio. Bullion value of silver 

dollar. 
1894—32.56 to 1 .491 

1S95— 31.60 to 1 .505 

1896 (six months) 

30.32 to 1 .528 

All but a small fraction of the indebtedness of 1896 was, 
according to the authorities, contracted in 1895 and 1894. 
In those years the creditor loaned to the debtor, on the sil- 
verite theory, 200-cent dollars; in the natural course of 
events, if he received payment in the first six months of 1896 '' 
he would receive dollars somewhat less than those he had 
loaned, but what else than swindling is it to compel him to 
receive for the 200-cent dollars which he loaned 100-cent dol- 
lars, on the ground that dollars were worth only 100 cents 
in 1873? Half of the great bulk of existing debts would, on 
the silverites' own theory, be stolen from the creditors for 
the benefit of debtors under the forms of law. 

THE WOLF AND THE LAMB. 

The creditors who have loaned within the last five years, 
including 99 per cent, of the class, when threatened with a 
depreciation of their dollar by half, in vain call attention to 
the fact that if the dollar of their debts has appreciated at 
all, the amount is infinitesimal and justifies in no event a 
greater reduction than that amount. 

It seems paradoxical to liken a debtor to a wolf and a cred- 
itor to a lamb, but the situation strongly suggests the fable 
in which the lamb was accused by the wolf first of disturbing 
his drinking water, though the lamb was downstream, and, 
secondly, of insulting the wolf at a date which the lamb 
showed was prior to his birth; on the strength of which pre- 
natal insult the lamb was torn to pieces and devoured. 

The free-coinage debtor of '96 says to his recently con- 
tracted debt: "You committed against me the crime of 1873. 
By that crime you have fattened at my expense to twice your 
original size. I will now justly proceed to tear you in two.' r 

"Alas," vainly pleads the youthful debt; "at the date you 
speak of I was not yet born." 



THE CRIME OF 166J. 



A Plea for the Remonetization of Wampum— Two 
Centuries of Debtors Wronged— Real Independence 
of European Financial Domination Proposed— 
Depreciation of Sea Shells. 

[The Washington Star, Oct. 30, 1890.] 

Hear the new American free coinage declaration of inde- 
pendence! A great and powerful nation of 70,000,000 peo- 
ple, with all our wonderful resources, is capable of having a 
financial policy and a distinctive money of its own; should 
not submit to remain in financial subjection to England or 
to all Europe; is able single-handed to double the price of 
silver or anything else in the markets of the world, and he 
who is so unpatriotic as to assert the contrary is a pusillani- 
mous, crawling, traitorous creature, whom it would be flat- 
tery to characterize as a nineteenth century Benedict Ar- 
nold! 

The first point of the declaration is that the gold standard, 
which has been the American standard in fact since 1834, 
and formally since 1873, is still European, foreign, alien; 
that in order to demonstrate our Americanism we must 
abandon the gold standard, which, unlike other Europeans, 
has not, it is alleged, become naturalized here, even after a 
sixty years' residence, and in establishing a new standard 
we must declare our independence of the world's commercial 
ratio of silver and gold and force upon all other nations a 
radically differing ratio of our own devising. 

Those who thus scorn European co-operation or advice in 
legislating coucerning the civilized world's medium of ex- 
change derive great comfort from the opinions and sugges- 
tions of Prince Bismarck, the representative of a gold-bug 
despotism and the land of the Kothschilds, whose views, 
curiously enough, these Europe-haters themselves solicited. 
Bismarck, the man of gold, as well as of blood and iroai, 
cynically replies in effect: "I was a gold bug while in con- 
trol of Germany, in fact, demonetized silver, yielding to ex- 
pert opinion, but while I believe in gold for Germany, I have 
had a predilection for bimetallism, especially for America* 



12 

which is freer to make dangerous experiments than Ger- 
man}. I approve heartily of a test of free coinage in the 
United States if not incompatible with your interests. If 
you succeed Germany may imitate you if she likes, and if 
you fail, nobody will suffer especially but yourself, and Ger- 
many may use you as a warning and horrible example." We 
are to dose ourselves experimentally as apothecary's cat for 
Europe; we are to pull chestnuts out of the fire for the bene- 
fit of European bimetallists, and in the very performance of 
these humiliating roles we are called upon to please our- 
selves with the idea that we are proclaiming and demon- 
strating our independence of Europe. 

The silverites' bogus declaration of independence appeals 
to our characteristic and dominating national pride, and at- 
tempts to pervert and abuse the national sentiment. Uncle 
Sam is placed in the position of a small boy who dares not 
take a dare, no matter how ridiculous or dangerous the feat 
to which he is challenged. 

One of the most effective of Eogers' cartoons in Harper's 
Weekly deals with this appeal to Uncle Sam's false pride. 
The free coinage bull is pictured as tossing poor Mexico high 
in the air. Bryan, as a small boy in a Lord Fauntleroy suit, 
is urging Uncle Sam to jump with him into the bull ring 
and tackle the infuriated animal, saying: "He can't do that 
to big men like me and you, Uncle Sam.'' 

REAL INDEPENDENCE. 

If we are going to declare our independence of the world's 
idea of the relative value of silver and gold and the world's 
preference concerning its form of money, let us cut loose en- 
tirely from the effete despotisms and old world notions. 
Why use silver as money? The world so scorned by us has 
long been using it. It is identified especially with Asia, 
with barbarous despotisms and the half-civilized races. Shall 
we accept our form of money and our financial ideas from 
the silver bugs of China? Shall we be ruined by Chinese 
cheap money? Cannot seventy millions of strong, rich and 
brainy Americans do better than copy China, India and Mex- 
ico? What is the original and characteristic American 
money, for which we are indebted neither to European gold 
bugs, nor Asiatic silver bugs, nor any effete, old world finan- 
cier whatsoever? Wampum, of course. We shall never rise 
to the full stature of our proud independence of the old world 
and its financial tyranny until we have restored this genuine 



13 

American money to the lofty legal-tender position which it 
occupied before it was struck down by the crime of 1605L 

Wampum, the Indian, and. consequently, the original and 
distinctively American money, was made of cylindrical per- 
forated beads of polished shell. It was also used for many 
years in the colonies, both in dealing with the Indians and 
among the colonists themselves. It was heartlessly de- 
monetized in Massachusetts in 1661, in 1062 in Khode Island, 
and soon afterward in Connecticut. New Xetherland was 
slower than the Xew England colonies to duplicate the 
Massachusetts crime of 16(51, but in the course of a few 
years, after vainly seeking to lower the coinage ratio of wam- 
pum to keep pace with the depreciation of that currency, 
Xew Xetherland also followed suit and demonetized wam- 
pum. 

Xew Netherlands desperate efforts from 1641 to 1662 to 
compel, by legislation, the colonists to receive the wampum 
at the coinage ratio tixed by law, and to preserve this ratio, 
though through overproduction at first, and demonetization 
by other colonies at last, the commercial value of the wam- 
pum was constantly depreciating, are full of interest, espe- 
cially in the light of the present struggle to bolster up an- 
other falling money. 

In 1611 the coinage ratio of wampum was four beads to 
one stiver, a stiver being an English penny, and each bead 
being, therefore, worth about half a cent. In that year an 
ordinance of the director and council of Xew Xetherland, 
April IS, declared: 

"Whereas very bad wampum is at present circulated here, 
and payment is made in nothing but rough, unpolished stuff, 
which is brought here from places where it is 50 per cent, 
cheaper than it is paid out here, and the good, polished wam- 
pum, commonly en lied Manhattan wampum, is wholly put 
out of sight or exported, which tends to the express ruin and 
destruction of this country (note that Greshains law (jets in 
its deadly work and the inferior money expels the superior); 
in order to provide in time therefor, we do therefore for the 
public good interdict and forbid all persons, of what state, 
quality or condition soever they may be, to receive in pay- 
ment or 1o paj out any unpolished wampum during the next 
month of May, except at five for one stiver, and that strung, 
and then after that six beads for one stiver. Whosoever 
shall be found to have acted contrary hereunto shall provi- 
sionally forfeit the wampum which is paid out and ten guild- 
ers for the poor, and both payer and payee are alike liable. 



14 



The well-polished wampum shall remain at its price as be- 
fore, to wit, four for one stiver, provided it be strung." 

This ordinance made the ratio 4 to 1 for polished wampum, 
5 and 6 to 1 for unpolished, and provided a penalty for de- 
parture from the legal ratios. 

In 1650, May 30, the ratio was further lowered by ordi- 
nance to six white (or three black) for one stiver, while in 
the case of poor-strung wampum the ratio was eight white 
(or four black) for one stiver. The penalty for refusal to 
obey this ordinance was "to be deprived of their trade and 
business.' 1 

In 1657 (November 29) an ordinance was passed which 
recites the excessive and intolerably high prices resulting 
from the abundance of wampum and its depreciation in 
value, and then proceeds to reduce the ratio from six to 
eight white beads for one stiver. It, however, excepts exist 
ing contracts from its operation, and to prevent swindling 
of debtors gives them three months in which to pay up at 
the old ratio. In this respect it was more honest than the 
present free coinage proposition in its bearing upon existing 
creditors. 

But even this reduction did not suffice, and in 1658 (No- 
vember 11), in despair of holding up wampum, an ordinance 
was passed fixing a maximum legal price upon the commodi- 
ties to be purchased with the wampum. The latter was still 
to be a legal tender at eight white beads to one stiver. It 
was forbidden to sell bread, beer or wine at a higher price 
in wampum than as follows: Half a gallon of beer, 12 sti- 
vers; can of French wine, 36 stivers; a coarse wheaten loaf 
(eight pounds weight), 14 stivers. 

In 1662 the 16 to 1 ratio had been reached, and, in view of 
the demonetization of wampum by other colonies, a further 
reduction of 24 to 1 was declared by an ordinance of Decem- 
ber 28, 1662, preliminary to its demonetization in New Neth- 
erland. If, instead of demonetizing wampum, after the 
example of the other colonies, New Netherland had by law 
re-established the old ratio of 4 to 1 as an act of justice to 
wampum, and contended that the price fixed by it must pre- 
vail in the other colonies, it would have done what the 
United States is now asked to do for silver. 

If now strong in the feeling that we are great enough and 
strong enough with our seventy millions of people and un- 
equaled resources to have a financial policy and a money in- 
dependent of all other nations, we resolve to discard gold 
with European domination and silver with Asiatic domino- 



15 

lion, and to restore to its former proud position as standard 
money of ultimate redemption our distinctively American 
money, wampum, which was struck down by the crime of 
1661 and 1662 ; we can adopt for wampum the historic ratio 
of 16 to 1, which prevailed in New Netherland in those 
years, and our policy will be sustained by all the 16 to 1 ar- 
guments which are now dinned in our ears. 

It may be objected that the commercial ratio of wampum 
is now much less than 16 beads to 1 penny. But what of 
that? Will not the price which the great and glorious re- 
public fixes for wampum at its mints raise the price to that 
figure over all the world? Who anywhere will be so foolish 
as ro take less than our mint price for his wampum? 

Will it not be dishonest to pay in wampum debts con 
tracted in gold? No. As compared with wampum, gold 
has been appreciating in value for over two hundred years, 
or ever since wampum was struck down by the crime of 
16G1-'G2. This appreciation has defrauded the debtors of the 
world for centuries. It is now high time that by the use as 
money of a commodity which has been depreciating during 
that period, justice should be done to wampum and retalia 
tion practiced by debtors upon the swindling creditors of two 
centuries. 

Will it not be favoritism toward a class of citizens, to wit, 
sea coast residents, at the expense of all other Americans, 
to make money of shells? No. The people of the interior 
with their gold and silver deposits have shackled America 
long enough in subjection to the financial policies of Europe 
and Asia and to their own enrichment. 

Can the United States thus multiply the price of wampum 
in the markets of the world? Where is the Benedict Arnold 
who will venture to assert that this great and glorious na- 
tion cannot make the world take sea shells at the value fixed 
at our mints? As Mr. Bryan suggests : To such dastards as 
dare to lay a limit to the power of the American people I 
hurl their cowardice and lack of patriotism in their faces. 

And what if the world will not accept our wampum 
money? Are we not a world w T ithin ourselves? Have we 
not declared our financial independence? W T ill not the re- 
sult be to save us from the horrors of currency contraction 
through European drainage of our supply, to cause us to 
make and spend all our money at home, and thus to boom 
everything and to protect and enrich everybody? 



SHYLOCK WORKMEN. 



Cutting Off the Nose in Order to Spite the Face— 
Down with the Eighth Commandment— Proposed 
Silver Independence Means a Chinese Isolation^- 
Our Country's Greatness. 

[The Washington Star, Oct. 31, 1896.] 

The creditor Skyloeks, marked for financial destruction in 
free coinage retaliation for the crime of 1873, include every 
one (millions in the aggregate) who is paid salary or wages 
only after service or labor is performed. To the extent to 
which free coinage depreciates the dollar in which wages are 
paid, to that extent it reduces wages, although they still re- 
main nominally at the same figure. Let us assume that free 
coinage would, as many of its advocates assert, raise the 
price of all commodities to double their present rate. No 
workingman believes that his wages would be doubled at 
once. He knows that months and years of strikes and lock- 
outs would elapse before wages could.be raised in due propor- 
tion. Cutting wages in half by their payment in 53-cent dol- 
lars might increase our foreign trade by placing our manufac- 
turers on an equal footing with competitors mainly in silver 
countries who have the advantage of employing cheap labor. 
American manufacturers would not dare to propose directly 
to American workmen this cut in wages; but if the workmen 
themselves clamor to be paid in depreciated money and the 
same result of a reduction in wages can be readied through 
compliance with the workingman's own demand, ihe 
thoughtless manufacturer who overlooks the disastrous ef- 
fect upon his future market of national repudiation and the 
adoption of a depreciated currency might be well pleased to 
take the workmen at their word. 

The necessity of paying high wages in this country in order 
to keep our people up to the mark of a higher order of life, 
development and culture than that prevailing in Japan, 
China and Mexico, has been the most serious drawback in 
American competition with many foreign manufacturers. 
Perhaps a temporary seeming business prosperity might fol- 
low if our workingmen would declare of their own accord 



17 

that they are overpaid, that our money is too good for them, 
and that they wish to be paid in the kind of money, with the 
same reduced purchasing power, that satisfies foreign cheap 
labor. But if any American workingmen are prepared for 
this act of self-sacrifice, why go at it in a roundabout way by 
debasing the national currency — a procedure which will 
swindle thousands of innocent third persons who are so un- 
fortunate as to be creditors, and work general panic and dis- 
aster? Why not move directly to the point and announce 
a willingness to have their wages reduced one-half without 
any tampering with the nation's money and the national 
honor? 

CUTTING OFF THE NOSE TO SPITE THE FACE. 

The individual who cut off his nose to spite his face is as 
Solomon in wisdom in comparison with the workman who, 
in response to the demagogue's appeal to spite the moneyed 
classes, cuts the purchasing power of his wages in two and 
leaves himself merely with the privilege of fighting for a pro- 
portionate increase to make matters even again. 

As the farmer is invited to raise at his own expense as tax- 
payer the price of silver, which he does not produce, in the 
hope that in some way he will thereby also raise the prices of 
what he does produce, so the laborer is invited to legalize 
half wages for himself now in the hope that his employer, 
whom Mr. Bryan is teaching him to hate as his natural 
enemy, will philanthropically double wages in the future in 
order to make him as prosperous as he was before. 



Another group of creditors who are to be swindled out of 
one-half of their dues by a 50-cent dollar are pensioners and 
holders of certain government bonds, the obligations to 
whom on the part of this republic are based upon bloodshed, 
danger incurred, sufferings endured and money advanced in 
order to save the Union. It is now proposed that a grateful 
nation shall show its appreciation of these services by dis- 
honorable repudiation of one-half of the obligations incurred 
in the struggle to preserve the nation's life. 

We are invited to revive in 1896 the spirit of 1776 and to 
declare our independence of the financial tyranny of Eng- 
land. The vital facts of the proposed independence are sil- 
ver monometallism, like that of Mexico, as our national 



18 

financial system, and the payment of 100-cent debts in 50- 
cent dollars. 

We are invited to declare not self-respecting independ- 
ence, but Chinese or Mexican isolation. We do not want to 
be isolated. We wish to be in touch with the rest of the 
world. The American spirit is a conquering, absorbing, 
•dominating spirit, not that of the surly hermit who shrinks 
from everybody in the recesses of his cave. We can hold 
our own with all the world. We want the best of every- 
thing in the world. We want to profit by the world's experi- 
ence in all respects and build to higher levels of civilization 
upon that experience as a foundation. We want the best 
language, English, the coming language of the globe. Who 
cares that it came to us from England, and who proposes 
that we declare a new independence of Great Britain, dis- 
card the English language and restore Choctaw as a dis- 
tinctively American tongue to the proud position which it 
occupied on this continent prior to the time when it was 
struck down by European immigration. We want the best 
money in all the world in order to make domestic and foreign 
exchanges, and we will not, merely because England uses it, 
discard gold, the world's money, and substitute either the 
Asiatic and South American money, silver, or our own North 
American wampum. 

INDEPENDENCE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. 

Our proposed isolation will be that of the outcast, for it 
will flow from repudiation of part of our national debt. We 
declare our independence not of the decrees of Lombard and 
Wall streets, but of the Ten Commandments. Our defiance 
is leveled not at British financial tyranny and the Roths- 
childs, but at the God of nations, who declares to govern- 
ments as to individuals, "Thou shalt not steal." 

The free-coinage pronunciamento is not a declaration of 
independence, but with its associated issues in this cam- 
paign is rather a proclamation of civil strife. The Chicago 
and St. Louis coalitionists run up the banner of repudiation, 
sectionalism and internal dissension. Their campaign ar- 
rays class against class, section against section, and appeals 
to ihe basest passions of the individual. 

The American republic, toward which depressed but aspir- 
ing humanity in every quarter of the globe has turned for in- 
spiration, is in this struggle subjected to a test of its right 
to live. Has the national conscience become corrupted? 



19 

Are the people, rent by passion and faction, class hatreds, 
sectional rancor and individual envy, greed and malice, to 
confess themselves unfit to govern themselves? 

The lessons which America has taught mankind are the 
capacity of the people for self-government, the dignity of 
labor and the true greatness of nations, not merely in pro- 
claiming peace and good will within its boundaries and to 
all men everywhere, but in diffusing the blessings of justice, 
of Christian beneficence and of the good faith which de- 
velops naturally and inevitably from a sensitive national 
conscience over its own people and the whole world. 

The spectacle of the masses of a vast population, the mas- 
ters of a new world, governing themselves with sound judg- 
ment, toiling industriously and with success for their own 
material, intellectual and moral advancement, toward whose 
progress the law, the government and all the national insti- 
tutions are tributary, has given life and strength to the spirit 
of liberty everywhere. The growth of the power of the peo- 
ple in this favored land and their advance in numbers and in 
physical conditions, in intelligent skill, in self-reliant readi- 
ness to grapple with emergencies, in fertility of resource, in 
broadening enterprise and in loftiness of ideals, have not 
only blessed America, but all of marveling mankind. 

The old world knew well only government by the few; 
America taught the possibility and the blessing of wise and 
righteous government by the many. 

The old world had degraded labor, till the workman was 
as the cattle of the field; America has magnified and glori- 
fied labor, as a Divine command, through obedience to which 
a whole nation of toilers have reaped the reward of un- 
equaled power and prosperity for themselves, and have pro- 
claimed human brotherhood and hopeful, helpful, Christian 
sympathy to the oppressed of all the world. 
* Shall we abdicate this noble leadership of nations? Shall 
we taint the stream of our world influence and change it 
from a blessing to a curse? Shall we destroy our lesson of 
the dignity and worth of labor and of the capacity of the 
common people for self-government by so using the forms of 
that government as in the name of that labor to strike down 
the national honor and to brand the republic as a swindler, 
filching from his coin of payment and shirking honest debts? 

The sweating of coin and the sweating of labor by employ- 
ers are alike infamous. It is proposed that Uncle Sam shall 
criminally apply the sweating system to the coin and the 
wages of the land and rob each of half its substance. 



20 

The very greatness in population and resources which is 
cited as a demonstration of our ability to declare our inde- 
pendence of the Ten Commandments furnishes a sufficient 
reason for adhering to the principles which have made us 
great, and for moving steadily forward in the path which 
we have trodden. 

To preserve liberty and union as one and inseparable, and 
to increase our domestic blessings and our wholesome in- 
fluence upon the world as the leader among nations in the 
arts of peace and civilized progress, it will be necessary for 
the great middle class, Lincoln's common people, the real 
rulers of America, to guard vigilantly against the encroach- 
ments of aggregated wealth on the one hand, and the threat- 
ening demonstrations of the lawless mob on the other; to 
steer the ship of state between the rocks of plutocracy and 
the whirlpool of repudiation and anarchy. But let no one 
in the name of the people preach the doctrine of sectional- 
ism and class prejudice, pointing to disunion, and the de- 
struction of the government by and for the people. Let no 
one in the name of labor degrade labor from its high estate. 
Let no one in the name of national pride stain the national 
credit and make the republic, once so honored, a hissing and 
a by-word among the nations of the earth. 

We are told by the free-coinage advocates that this nation 
is great enough, single-handed, to double the price of silver 
over all the globe; great enough to make fifty cents one hun- 
dred cents by act of Congress; great enough to bear, Atlas- 
like, a world's weight of silver on its shoulders; great 
enough, by its own voluntary act, to double with impunity 
the pressure of this crushing load. 

But the nation is not great enough — in folly — to attempt 
unnecessarily and with no promise of reward this impossible 
task, and is not great enough — in knavery — to brazen out 
the swindle which will result from its inevitable failure to 
raise the burden of the silver of the world to twice its pres- 
ent level. 

The nation is too great to be ungrateful to the pensioners 
and bondholders who risked life and treasure in the repub- 
lic's defense in its mortal struggle; too great to stifle the 
warning whispers of the national conscience against dishon- 
orable repudiation of just obligations; too great to place 
upon America and Americans the stigma of fraudulent 
bankruptcy; too great for isolation and disgraceful exile 
from the family of .civilized nations; in short, too great to be 
dishonest, too great to be nailed to a silver cross after the 
fashion and as a legitimate successor of the impenitent thief. 



WASHINGTONIANA. 



Speech at Board of Trade Reception, February 
20th, 1894. 

It is seldom that the people of Washington enjoy the privi- 
lege of meeting their Congressional partners in the work of 
capital making, and the occasions are still rarer when the 
Washingtonians, the silent partners of the firm, have the 
opportunity of speaking their minds. The phrase-makers 
have coined an expressive designation, "the unspeakable 
Turk."' But the Washingtonian is better entitled to this ad- 
jective. For in his public affairs it must be admitted that 
the unspeakable Washingtonian is even less speakable than 
the unspeakable Turk. 

The meetings of silent and active partners are often scenes 
of recrimination, and it is easy to imagine the partners as- 
sembled to-night as indulging in this reprehensible practice. 

Washington, the silent partner, might be conceived as say- 
ing to Congress: "I contributed to you as the active part- 
ner in the capital-making firm five-sevenths of the site of the 
city and my rights and privileges of American citizenship. I 
supplied the fund from which the firm's original public 
buildings were erected. The pledges which you made at 
that time on the strength of these contributions have been 
repeatedly violated. For three-fourths of a century you tried 
to freeze me out of participation in the benefits of the part- 
nership. You have pocketed my contributed capital, neg- 
lected the business of the firm, and forced it on at least one 
occasion into bankruptcy. Even now, when a quickening of 
conscience and an accession of national and patriotic pride 
have made you comparatively faithful to your trust, you are 
repeatedly levying upon me unjust assessments in violation 
of the spirit of our agreement, and having long cruelly 
wronged me, you now treat my requests and complaints 
with contempt." 

And Congress might be imagined as replying: "You are 
the noisiest silent partner that the mind of man can con- 



22 

ceive. You are a chronic grumbler and kicker, growling at 
everything I do or leave undone in conducting the firm's 
business. I cannot be bothered with your petty affairs 
when important national concerns demand my attention. 
Your people wrangle among themselves and make contradic- 
tory suggestions. If you don't know what you want your- 
self, how am I to heed your requests and your advice?" 

But no such recrimination as that suggested is in the 
slightest degree threatened to-night. The members of the 
Board of Trade are not the sort of individuals to invite un- 
suspecting Congressmen to break the bread and taste the 
salt of their hospitality, and then take- advantage of the oc- 
casion to pound them for the shortcomings of other Con- 
gresses and other Congressmen. Neither the citizens nOr 
the legislators who deserve to be scolded are here to receive 
their punishment. The faithful and able friends who have 
shown their interest in the Capital and its welfare by as- 
sembling in this hall to-night are not the men who need to 
be lectured on constitutional duty, patriotic pride or public 
spirit. On neither side of the partnership shall we fall into 
the clergyman's error of scolding the congregation present 
for the absence of those not on hand to receive merited re- 
proof. 

Many a time in noting how one section of the city has 
stood coldly aloof or has actively obstructed when another 
section was striving for some public improvement or the re- 
moval of some public evil from its confines, I have been re- 
minded of Aesop's fable of the father and the quarreling 
sons, who were unable to break the fagots when collected in 
a bundle, but easily broke them one by one when the bundle 
was unclosed and the sticks were handled separately. And 
I can imagine Forefather Washington, like the father in the 
fable, saying in spirit to his sons, the men of his namesake 
city: "My sons, if you are of one mind and unite to assist 
one another, you will be as this bundle, uninjured by all the 
attempts of your enemies; and if you are divided among 
yourselves you will be broken as easily as these sticks." 

When we of Washington have removed the obstacle to the 
city's highest development which our own lack of hearty and 
organized co-operation supplies, there is strong reason to be- 
lieve that Congressional inertia and indifference may be over- 
come, that the District's legislature will perform faithfully 
its constitutional function and that our brightest dreams of 
the future of Washington will be fully realized. 

Let the Board of Trade collect the scattered sticks of 



23 

Washington's resources for aggression and resistance, and 
the resulting combination will be unbreakable and irresisti- 
ble. 

In spite of the drawbacks suggested, the capital-making 
partnership has of late .years labored satisfactorily upon its 
task. An ugly, straggling village has been converted into a 
beautiful city. But the great results in certain respects 
which have been accomplished serve to render conspicuous 
by contrast the lack of a corresponding development in other 
things, like a few pieces of furniture of inharmonious rich- 
ness in the municipal house. The city must live up to the 
newest and best of its furniture. It must be supplied with 
all the fittings and belongings of a great modern capital. 

The city's rapid growth has been recent; the new Wash- 
ington is still in its infancy; and this fact significantly sug- 
gests to the ambitious and public-spirited that the opportuni- 
ties are not by any means exhausted of conspicuous identifi- 
cation with the upbuilding of the Capital. In many cities 
the grooves have long ago been formed in which municipal 
affairs and achievements must run. The founders and crea- 
tors of the greatness of these cities are historic names and 
the list is closed. In the case of Washington, the city in which 
the whole republic takes pride is building upon a city in 
which for three-fourths of a century no one took pride. It 
is now building and its founders and builders are of the liv- 
ing present. A vast deal remains to be accomplished. There 
is room for every notable contributor to the welfare of the 
expanding capital to erect for himself a conspicuous and en- 
during monument as a creator of the new Washington. 
There is room for a L'Enfant and a Washington in planning 
and perfecting a second city, larger in area than the first, 
which is springing up outside the present urban boundaries. 
Who will give it a model street system without oppressing 
and impoverishing the city; a model sewer system; a model 
rapid transit system? 

Xot only is there this recent city to offer a field of munici- 
pal achievement, but the old city has tasted the elixir of life 
and is itself a new Washington. Who will successfully 
champion its requests for current maintenance and develop- 
ment before the appropriations committees? Who will bless 
it with a code of modern laws? Who will give it a safe, sat- 
isfactory and reasonably attractive system of railroad termi- 
nals? Who will secure for it a creditable municipal build- 
ing? Who will revolutionize its whole bridge system and 
efface, especially, the national disgrace of the present Long 



24 

Bridge? Who will mend its ways, especially its footways, 
its dilapidated and discreditable sidewalks? Who will cure 
the hundred ills which afflict and hamper the growing city? 
Who will identify himself with the making of the world's 
modern capital that is to be and build to himself still living 
an historic monument? 

In the name of the people of the National Capital, I invite 
all present to-night, guests and hosts, young and old alike, 
to enroll their names and act vigorously their parts among 
the patriarchs of the infant and prospective city in the re- 
nowned and patriotic order of founders of the new and 
greater Washington. 



Speech as President of the Washington Board of 
Trade, at the Board's Annual Reception at the 
Arlington, February 24th, 1898. 

Once a year, at the invitation of their Washington con- 
stituents of the Board of Trade, the constitutionally ap- 
pointed municipal legislators of the District of Columbia 
hold an evening session at the Arlington, instead of at the 
Capitol, in which these local constituents are permitted to 
participate. 

On these occasions newcomers among our distinguished 
aldermen and common councilmen have an opportunity to 
catch something of the drift of public sentiment among the 
quarter million of people whose legislative needs are en- 
trusted exclusively to their tender mercies, and they are also 
enabled to inspect samples of their Capital constituents and 
to ascertain whether the Washingtonian really has horns, 
hoofs and a forked tail, as some allege. On their part the 
Washingtonians, having for this occasion only the privileges 
of the floor, may corner the evasive Congressmen, hem them 
in will) chairs, and compel attention to a year's accumula- 
tion of suppressed utterances — just as I am doing at the 
presenl moment. 

In welcoming our guests to this joint session the tempta- 
tion to a loyal Washingtonian is almost irresistible to dilate 
copiously upon the beauties of the developing Capital, like a 
doling mother with her only child as a text. And there is 
something inspiring in the reflection that we residents of or 
legislators lor the nation's city are finishing the work which 
the fathers began, and are building up to-day a new, en- 






larged and constantly expanding- Washington on more ex 
tensive lines and with a finer municipal equipment than the 
most optimistic forefather ever pictured in his rosiest 
dreams. 

But Washington does more than appeal to the national 
pride; it is a distinct factor in developing and strengthening 
patriotic sentiment. 

Like anti-Tammany in a recent election, the nation needs 
very much a unifying force. American national sentiment 
hidden under modern cynicism, unsentimental and selfish 
business interests and sectional prejudices is wrapped in as 
many coverings as the Egyptian mummy, and frequently 
has no more apparent life than the remains of the great 
Barneses; but the electric shock not only of threatened na- 
tional danger, but merely of the unexpected sight of the flag 
or sound of some national air in foreign lands will pierce and 
consume the obstructive coverings and revivify in an instant 
the latent patriotism. 

A stroke of lightning should not, however, be required to 
give active life to the spirit of American nationality. Espe- 
cially should not miserable sectional prejudices, jealousies 
and misunderstandings be fostered at the expense of a broad 
Americanism, and be permitted to weaken and destroy the 
patriotic national sentiment. 

I lived for four years in South Dakota just before that 
hustling community became a State. As a full-fledged, en- 
thusiastic Dakotan, I vigorously resented many a time 
Eastern misconceptions of that community's spirit and tend- 
ency; Eastern sneers at a people of unbounded energy and 
intelligent progressiveness, in whose miniature cities the 
school house was ever the conspicuous public building; 
Eastern denunciations of them as unfit for statehood, and 
as suitable material only for a rotten borough in the Ameri- 
can system. Then there were not merely conscious and 
avowed caricatures, but serious references, based on honest 
ignorance, which represented this people as being fittingly 
typified by the whooping cowboy, full of bad whisky and 
puncturing the atmosphere with buljets, or by the jay farmer 
with abnormal goatee and a potato side to bis head. Worse 
still were the malicious libels imputing universal knavery 
to the community, picturing the citizens as chased from the 
East by criminal records, as robbing the Government by 
vast and systematic land frauds, as combining in a body to 
swindle innocent Easterners by salted mines, bogus town 
sites and worthless mortgage securities. But I soon found 



26 

that there was reciprocity in sectional misconceptions, and 
that many Westerners evened up matters by' classifying 
Easterners who remained in the East either as brainless 
dudes, boasting inherited money and nothing else, or as 
sharpers using unscrupulous brains in the pursuit of money, 
from the Shylocks of Wall street to the gold-brick bunco 
man. I also discovered that as an ex-Washingtonian I was 
compelled to resent Western misconceptions of the people of 
the Capital as frequently as Eastern misconceptions of the 
community of which I was an adopted member. 

And I call upon every Western man within sound of my 
voice to remember that the representation of Washington- 
ians as untaxed mendicants, dependent upon the national 
bounty, is denounced by them as a lying and insulting cari- 
cature, as atrocious as any emanating from the ignorant 
East under whose injustice the Westerner himself may have 
smarted. As I frequently pointed out to my fellow South 
Dakotans, the District of Columbia has not been a notable 
national beneficiary even as compared with the new Western 
States like South Dakota itself. 

The owners of the soil of Washington were here before 
the Government came, before the nation and Government 
were even created. They gave up their own property to 
the Government that the nation might practically own and 
exclusively control a national city. They donated to the 
nation five-sevenths of the area of Washington. 

The greater part of the soil of most of the Western States 
was, on the other hand, at first the territory of the nation, 
acquired by purchase, conquest or treaty, including treaties 
with the Indians, and passed by gift to individual settlers 
under the homestead and timber culture laws, and by nom- 
inal sale, but actual gift under the pre-emption laws. The 
nation wisely donated land to the people who would live 
upon it and cultivate it. Later, when these communities of 
settlers became Slates, the nation gave back to them the 
proceeds of the sales under the pre-emption law in the shape 
of grants of money for educational purposes, and added 
1 hereto vast laud grants direct, including over one hundred 
millions of acres for schools and colleges. 

Thus, in the case of Washington, private individuals were 
the donors and the nation was the beneficiary; in the case 
of my adopted State and others, for instance,' in the Louisi- 
ana purchase, the nation was the donor and the individuals 
and communities i lie beneficiaries. 



But this, some one ma}' say, is ancient history. Let it be 
conceded that Washingtonians many years ago aided a 
poverty-stricken national government, put up with its broken 
pledges, and performed almost unassisted, for three-quarters 
of a century, the work of capital-making, nominally as- 
sumed by the nation, — Are you not untaxed beggars now? 

The nation which at first owned five-sevenths of Wash- 
ington, still owns one-half, and its percentage now increases 
every year. It still holds and exercises exclusive control 
over that city. The taxes which Washington pays are de- 
termined by Congress alone. If they are too light the 
reproach attaches not to Washington but to Congress; but 
they are not too light. 

The census records of 1890 show that the per capita mu- 
nicipal tax levy of Washington is greater than that of the 
vast majority of American municipalities exceeding 4,000 in 
population. It exceeds that of Omaha, Allegheny City and 
Indianapolis, and is only slightly exceeded by that of Cleve- 
land, Newark and Milwaukee, all cities approximating it in 
size. The per capita indebtedness of Washington far ex- 
ceeds that of any of the enumerated cities. It is nearly 
twice as great as the next largest, and seven times the small- 
est. Xot one of these cities has so large a floating non-tax- 
paying population as Washington, with its one-third negro 
population and its thousands of temporary residents and 
Government employes. This non-taxpaying element re- 
duces the nominal per capita tax levy without reducing it in 
fact by money subscriptions. Xot one of the enumerated 
cities has so few money-making resources in commerce, 
trade and manufactures in proportion to population with 
which to meet this drain of taxation. 

A like showing is made in national taxation. The only 
present national taxes which fall directly, and unmistakably 
and in ascertainable amounts upon Americans, are the in- 
ternal revenue taxes. In 1895 the District, in spite of the 
comparative smallness of its area and population, contrib- 
uted to this fund more than any one of sixteen States and 
five territories. 

It contributed more than the combined contributions of 
Maine, Vermont, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, 
Idaho and Wyoming. It has no representation in the na- 
tional legislature which is paid from, and which disburses 
this fund, while the States whose combined contributions 
are exceeded by its own alone have 14 votes in the Senate 
and 18 in the House. 



28 

The Washingtonian's per capita contribution to that fund 
exceeded in 1895 that of the citizens of twenty-two States 
and five territories. 

For instance, we paid into the fund from which are drawn 
the salaries of the South Dakota Senators and Representa- 
tives nearly six times as much as the South Dakotan; toward 
the salary of the Kansas Congressman five times as much 
as the Kansan; for the Texas Congressman five times as 
much as the Texan; for the Vermont Congressman over 
ten times as much as the Verinonter; for the Congressman 
from South Carolina or Arkansas, twelve times as much as 
the Arkansan or South Carolinian; and for the Mississippi 
Congressman one hundred and twenty times as much as the 
Mississippian. 

This mistaken idea concerning the people of the capital, 
indeed, sectional misconceptions and prejudices of all sorts, 
great or small, whether entertained in North, South, East 
or West, should be gradually modified and finally eliminated 
to the end that a broad, loyal, genuine Americanism may 
pervade the whole land. 

We are to recognize that our country in its physical as- 
pects with seacoasts and ports, its manufacturing, agricult- 
ural and mining sections, all interdependent and necessary 
to one another's prosperous existence, is the pre-ordained 
home of a single people; that this is the American people, 
"one from many," wonderfully homogeneous in spite of di- 
versity of origin, one in ideas, associations, sympathies and 
national objects. 

We Americans of 1898 are to say with the fullness of 
conviction and the quadrupled emphasis of a hundred years 
of experience what Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina 
said almost prophetically in 1765, at the Colonial Congress 
in New York: "There ought to be no New Englandman, no 
Now Yorker known on the Continent, but all Americans." 

In accomplishing this result there is a distinct field of 
usefulness for the capital with its unifying, nationalizing, 
patriotic influence. 

Washington was brought into being as peculiarly and ex- 
clusively the home and abiding place of the Nation as dis- 
tinguished from the State. It is the crystallization of the 
national idea, the substantial embodiment of the abstract 
CJnion. Here, literally, there is no New Englandman, no 
New Yorker, but all Americans. 

The city of the whole nation has planted deeply in every 
portion of the republic the roots of its existence. It is an 



20 

object of pride and affection to all Americans. Here all 
come together on equal terms, upon land in which they have 
a common interest, governed exclusively by the Union of 
which they are a part. The West learns the East, the North 
the South, and vice versa. All sections are bound more 
closely together. Prejudices are softened and gradually 
removed. National sentiment dominates, the American 
spirit is developed, and patriotism is strengthened. 

George Washington foresaw this unifying, nationalizing 
function of the capital, and for that reason proposed to 
locate in it the national university, which he projected. 
Here, he said, the susceptible youth of the land, in the at- 
mosphere of the nation's city, and reviewing the workings 
of the General Government, would be impressed with a 
love of our national institutions, counteracting both foreign 
influences and sectional sentiments. The university of 
which he dreamed was never born, but, carrying out his 
idea on a grander scale, the capital has itself become a 
national university, in which a whole people are students, 
for the promotion of liberal, enlarged and patriotic Ameri- 
canism, teaching enthusiastic love of country, and making 
of all of us better citizens. 



Speech as President of the Washington Board of 
Trade at the Board's Annual Shad-bake at Mar- 
shall Hall, May 21st, 1898. 

In greeting our guests of to-xlay in the name of the Board 
of Trade a few words touching the nature of this gathering 
may be appropriate. 

Our annual shad-bake is a Potomac Valley substitute for 
the barbecue in the, opportunity which it offers to legisla- 
tors to mingle out-of-doors in a democratic go-as-you-please 
fashion, with their constituents. Since the Constitution — 
and not our own votes — selects for us our exclusive legis- 
lators, who are to-day among our guests, we are not per- 
haps entitled to any ante-election explanations or assurances, 
and the political fence-mending customary at the barbecue 
or camp-meeting, is here perhaps superfluous. 

It is well, however, for Washingtonians and their Con- 
gressional aldermen and common councilmen to come to- 
gether frequently in open, manly fashion for the inter- 



30 

change of opinion and information. Unless in some mysteri- 
ous way it is conducive to wise law-making that legislators 
should be total strangers to the constituents whose legisla- 
tive needs are to be learned and supplied, this partial in- 
troduction of aldermen and common councilmen to local 
taxpayers is most advisable, both for the welfare of the 
Federal District, and for the benefit of the conscientious 
legislator, entrusted by 'the Constitution with the duty of 
assisting to shape the destinies of the National Capital and 
a resident community of nearly 300,000 people. 

This duty cannot be well and faithfully performed by a 
hermit who keeps himself persistently ignorant concerning 
local conditions, and who shrinks from contact with the 
people for whom he is to legislate. 

A wholesome tendency of these shad-bakes is to bring 
about a closer acquaintance between the national legisla- 
tors and their local constituents under the Constitution, and 
a better Congressional understanding of genuine local needs, 
and in spite of certain picnic crudenesses in entertainment, 
and unavoidable individual discomforts from annoying sun 
or pelting rain or an over-enthusiastic reception by resident 
red ants, our hope has been that occasions like the present, 
so characteristic of this section of the world, would prove 
interesting and enjoyable. 

Our trip down the Potomac and the spectacle after ar- 
rival here of the planking and absorption of innumerable 
shad turn our thoughts naturally to the river and its in- 
habitants; and serve to remind the local historians that 
the first white man who ever sailed over the river's surface 
commented with astonishment upon the abundance of fish 
in the Potomac, whose appropriate Indian name signifies: 
-'Where fishes spawn in shoals." 

This man, Captain John Smith, of that famous and ubi- 
quitous family, well known everywhere even in those early 
days, who sailed up the river in 1607, many years before 
the Puritan forefathers landed at Plymouth Rock, has proved 
himself as a teller of fish stories the worthy forerunner of 
the most gifted imaginations of our local fishing clubs. What 
member of any of these organizations can fail to take a 
professional interest and pride in Smith's description of the 
solid mass of Potomac fish, "laying," he said, "so thick, with 
heads above the water," that for want of nets he attempted 
to catch them with a frying pan. 

Moreover, the first white man who ever lived on the banks 



31 

of the Potomac, Henry Fleet, who was captured by Nacos- 
tan Indians in 1621, and dwelt a captive for several years 
on or near the present site of Washington, bears cumulative 
testimony to the amazing numbers of Potomac fish. Fleet 
also discovered that the Nacostan Indians not only planked 
their shad, but also their human captives, fastening them 
to a stake or tree, and roasting them by means of surround- 
ing fires. Indeed, Fleet narrowly escaped being thus 
"planked" himself. 

From these beginnings all through our records the Poto- 
mac is rich in historic associations. With the home of George 
Washington on the Virginia bank opposite to where I now 
stand, and with George Washington's and the nation's city 
not many miles from here on the Maryland shore, the Poto- 
mac cut a notable figure in revolutionary and early repub- 
lican annals. A meeting at Alexandria and informally at 
Mt. Vernon of Maryland and Virginia commissioners to dis- 
cuss interstate arrangements concerning the Potomac be- 
came the nucleus of the Constitutional Convention and the 
movement for the formation of "a more perfect union." 
From the creation of the Capital upon the banks of the Poto- 
mac the nation's city and its river are identified with na- 
tional history, through the war of 1812, and the Civil War, 
and through the various stages of peaceful development 
down to the present day. 

I feel like apologizing for the present appearance of our 
river, which has evidently been on a high old tear up in 
Maryland and Virginia, and now moves sluggishly to the 
Capital and Mt. Vernon, with purity defiled, and with a 
next morning's biliousness coffee-coloring every lineament. 
But I hope that our legislators, pardoning the Potomac's 
misbehavior, will be inspired as the result of their inspec- 
tion of its relations to the capital to utilize our great and 
historic river to its full capacity for the benefit of the health, 
trade and general welfare of Washington. An unlimited 
and wholesome water supply is tendered the Capital if our 
legislature will only make wise and adequate provision of 
aqueducts, reservoirs, settling basins and filter beds. The 
river will also serve as an effective transporting agent to 
sweep the capital's sewage harmlessly into the sea, if Con- 
gress will only provide the comprehensive system which is 
to convey the sewage to a safe point below the city and 
commit it to the Potomac's current. When the malarious 
marshes of the Anacostia, as well as of the Potomac, have 



82 

been banished, the quickened waters will cut large slices 
from the District's death rate. Public baths and a bathing 
beach may be made to contribute further to the city's health. 

We of Washington must master the Potomac, harness it 
and put it to work. It must no longer be permitted, in the 
absence of a sea wall and through the presence of Long 
Bridge, to threaten the city with flood; or unsettled and un- 
til tered, to permeate with the historic soil of Virginia the 
physical systems of those of us who are accustomed to 
drink water; or to disseminate malaria from marshy flats; 
or being practically bridgeless, so far as modern structures 
are concerned, to obstruct communication with Virginia 
and the South. We must make of it the city's faithful ser- 
vant, as a cleansing and purifying agent fanning the capital 
with cool and healthful breezes, bringing pure cold water to 
every home, quickly removing the gas-generating sewage, 
serving through its recreated fisheries as a source of cheap 
and abundant food supply, fostering light manufactures and 
furnishing force for illuminating and transportation pur- 
poses by means of the Great and Little Falls water power, 
and finally in its dredged and deepened channels reviving 
the ancient commercial glories of this region when George- 
town, Alexandria and Bladensburg contended for the su- 
premacy. 

While thus developing the usefulness of the Potomac in 
all directions for the purposes of peace, the National Gov- 
ernment will not neglect the precautions which prevent 
the river from being an easy means of hostile access to the 
Capital in time of war. The great guns which sweep the 
Potomac not many miles from here, and the mines which 
lurk under its waters give assurances on this point. 

When Washington was threatened by the British in 1S14 
our Secretary of War scoffed at the idea that the enemy 
would really attack what he sneeringly designated as the 
"sheep-walk," and the capital was left practically unpro- 
tected. The national sentiment toward Washington is now 
far different from thai which then prevailed. Affectionate 
pride has taken the place of contemptuous neglect. 

The nation's city has nothing to fear from either the 
direct or indirect effects of war, unless the nation itself is 
overthrown, in which event the capital will share its fate. 
The truth is that the national patriotic sentiment upon 
which the prosperity of both the Union and the city of the 
Union is based, weakens from disuse and neglect in times 



3:J 

of busy, peaceful money-making, and grows strong in times 
of national danger, when Americans appreciate most pro- 
foundly that the Union is not a mere abstraction, but some- 
thing to love, to live for, and if need be, to die for. Herein 
is found one of the compensations of war to counterbal- 
ance some of its evil, a revival and new birth of patriotism, a 
repudiation of sectional prejudices, a discarding of the ob- 
structive coverings of undue love of money and of cynical 
dislike of sentimentalism with which the American is too 
often accustomed to cover and conceal the national pa- 
triotic sentiment. 

In China there is domestic worship of the god of wealth. 
In Japan, while the seven gods of wealth are not neglected, 
the essence of the national religion — Shintoism — is patrio- 
tism, reverence of the Emperor, love of country. Let us 
observe in our devotions to the Almighty Dollar a Japanese 
subordination of that worship to patriotic reverence of na- 
tive land, placing above love of money both love of country 
and love of God. 

The city of the Union, created, largely owned and exclu- 
sively controlled by the nation, is identified in its fortunes 
with the Union itself. Washington typifies the vitality, con- 
tinued prosperity and grand destiny of the republic, which 
it shows forth in miniature and which it is destined forever 
to reflect. From the bloodshed of the revolution the nation 
and its capital arose. The civil war, which in its ultimate 
effects tightened the bonds of union, quickened and strength- 
ened a wholesome love of country, and made the republic a 
unit, strong and great, developed in proportion the nation's 
city. A grander and more perfect capital, as well as a 
grander and more perfect union sprang from the smoke 
of battle. And so our foreign war of to-day causes the 
men of every State and section to feel that first of all they 
are Americans, and that in modern as in ancient times 
it is sweet even to die for one's country. This struggle stirs 
the patriot blood of the nation, of late grown somewiiat 
sluggish, dissipates narrow sectionalism, solidifies the Union, 
and broadens and strengthens the foundations of patriotic 
sentiment upon which both the nation and the nation's 
city rest. 

In war and peace, in prosperity and adversity, in life and 
death, the republic and its capital are one and inseparable. 



34 



Speech as President of the Washington Board of 
Trade at the Annual Reception, February 23, 
1899. 

At this year's joint session in the Arlington assembled of 
Congress, the Capital's only legislature, and the Washington 
Board of Trade, representing the people of the District, there 
are two topics which demand and must receive immediate 
and special attention: 

1. Washington is about to ask Congress to accept largely 
on faith and to enact without prolonged debate a codification 
of the District laws, prepared by Judge Cox, and now under- 
going revision and approval by the Bar Association, the Dis- 
trict Commissioners, the Board of Trade, and the citizens 
general^. 

The foundation of the law of the District is the common 
law, as modified by old British statutes "found applicable 
to local and other circumstances" in Maryland at the time 
of the first English emigration to that colony, and as 
further modified by old Maryland statutes enacted prior to 
the session of the present District to the United States. 
These ancient enactments have not been sufficiently altered 
by Congress or construed out of existence by our courts. 
The local statutes have been aptly compared to those of the 
Medes and Persians, which change not. Thus it happens 
that many of our basic laws date from a time when American 
colonies were fining men in tobacco for staying home from 
church, or boring the tongues of those who swore as many 
as three times, or punishing scolding women with the duck- 
ing stool. 

The Capital's statutory clothing with its variegated ma- 
terials displays a Joseph's coat of many colors, and in dam- 
aged condition and antique cut it suggests Rip Van Winkle's 
costume just after his awakening. 

On the basic material of the common law — now consider- 
ably moth-eaten, torn, worn threadbare, hanging in tatters — 
have been fastened patches of old British and Maryland stat- 
utes, and the later patches of occasional acts of Congress. 
There has been some scientific patching of comparatively 
recent date, and the courts in pursuance of their power of 
construing the statutes, have constructed a lining for the 
suit, which, without materially altering its antique outward 
appearance, renders it in some respects much more com- 
fortable. But the greater part of the occasional patches, 



35 

since the suit was first fitted, have been sewn in at random, 
experimentally, by amateur legislative tailors, adjusted to 
no want, remedying nothing, and only adding to its pictur- 
esque inutility as a practical covering of municipal naked- 
ness. 

When Maryland ceded the land now constituting the Dis- 
trict that State was protected by the same statutory clothing 
with which the Capital w T as blessed. But since then Mary- 
land has been periodically and at frequent intervals supplied 
with successive suits of modern legislation in conformity 
with the progress and fashion of the times. The District's 
suit of the end of the last century has never received a com- 
prehensive overhauling, repairing and renovating. 

We need a new suit of laws, following in a general way 
for comfort's sake the lines to which we have grown accus- 
tomed, but reproducing in sound, substantial and modern 
material the old and approved pattern. In ridding the mu- 
nicipality of mildewed and decayed garments, displaying 
rents and shreds and tatters, some improvements in modern 
cut may appropriately be secured in the new well-fitting 
suit. We desire the change, even though the proposed gar- 
ments may be thought to show obvious defects. At their 
worst they will respond more readily to mending and patch- 
ing than the hopelessly antiquated costume which now pre- 
tends to protect the community from municipal hot winds 
and icy blasts. 

So let our legislators bless the Capital with the suit ready- 
made by Judge Cox, and approved as to its general pattern 
by the whole community. Do not insist that it shall be of 
the precise legislative cut to which you are accustomed in 
your home State. The pattern of all the States cannot be 
followed. Contention over the matter means delay and de- 
nial. Give to the Capital its new suit of statutory clothing 
and give it ungrudgingly and promptly. 

2. Washington proposes — and the President of the United 
States heartily endorses the proposition— that the Nation 
and the National Capital co-operate to celebrate worthily in 
1.900 the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the 
Republic's permanent seat of government in the District of 
Columbia. 

The changes wrought by the nineteenth century in both 
Nation and Capital, have been striking, even marvelous. 

In 1800 more than two-thirds of the Republic's 5,300,000 
population lived within fifty miles of Atlantic tidewater, 
scattered through a thousand miles of forest, or collected in 



36 

a few seaport towns. Five hundred thousand had pene- 
trated the Alleghanies and were swallowed up in an inac- 
cessible wilderness, separated everywhere from the sea-board 
population by at least a hundred miles of mountainous 
country. Thus the Union was not a physical unity. Diffi- 
culties of land transit kept even the Americans of the long,, 
narrow Atlantic fringe of settlement isolated as compara- 
tive strangers. The trans- Alleghany settlers had even less 
in common with the seaboard population, and rather looked 
forward to independent development with an outlet, not east- 
ward, but southward, through the Mississippi to the Gulf of 
Mexico. Not even the idea of the unity of the Union was 
strongly and generally developed in the American mind. 
There was no great confidence of the quick growth of a 
homogeneous nation. In the opinion of Thomas Jefferson,. 
a statesman accused of being a visionary enthusiast, the 
full settlement of the western country between the Alle- 
ghanies and the Mississippi would not be accomplished for 
thousands of years. In his first inaugural, Jefferson spoke 
of our country as furnishing "room for our descendants, to 
the hundredth and the thousandth generation." The same 
Jefferson, usually sanguine, lacked unwavering confidence 
in the continued unity of the Republic, and spoke at times 
with strange indifference concerning its possible disintegra- 
tion. ''Whether we remain in one confederacy," he wrote 
in 1804, "or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confedera- 
tions, I consider not very important to the happiness of 
either part." 

In the century now closing the republic has developed into 
the Union, physically and in spirit. Territorial acquisitions 
have expanded the national domain from ocean to ocean, 
and the nation has grown into a. symmetrical giant, with 
mountain backbone, veins and arteries of rivers and lakes, 
sinews of steel rails, nerves of electric wires, intersecting, 
communicating and giving unity to the most widely-separa- 
ted portions of the nation's body. The Union is also one of 
spirit. The growth of national sentiment has been continu- 
ous. That principle prevailed in the Civil War. Since that 
war we have all been nominally Unionists and Nationalists. 
In the war with Spain, with its unification of reunited sec- 
tions, the nominal has become the real. The Union is one 
in fact. 

In 1800 the Republic dominated nothing, not even with 
certainty itself. In 1000 it will dominate one hemisphere — 
and a slice of another; it w T ill control an isthmian canal, a 



37 

new trans-continental connection between the Atlantic and 
Pacific States; and will command the West Indian and 
Hawaiian approaches thereto. It will move irresistibly to- 
ward trade supremacy in the favor of our American neigh- 
bors to the south and our Asiatic neighbors to the west, and 
whether in Atlantic or Pacific, it will labor effectively and 
with enlightened selfishness for the common good of Ameri- 
ca and all mankind. 

The growth of the Capital since 1800 has kept pace with 
that of the nation. The national sentiment which trans- 
formed confederation into nominal union, created the ten 
miles square as the Union's exclusive territory, the material 
embodiment of that national principle. The Civil War con- 
firmed the Union as a legal entity, strengthened immensely 
the national sentiment, and in its results lifted the Capital 
from the mud and placed it upon a pinnacle. The Spanish 
war made a reality of the abstract Union, and the Capital 
promptly responds to the impetus thereby given to national 
sentiment. Bryce, in the American Commonwealth, says 
that the people of the United States, owing allegiance to 
State and nation, have two patriotisms, two loyalties. We 
of the District of Columbia, owing allegiance only to the 
nation, have only one patriotism, one loyalty. We are 
Americans and nothing else. Our allegiance is undivided. 
Our Americanism is unmixed, exclusive, all-pervading. 

In 1800 the small population of the Capital was collected 
largely in two settlements, one Hamburgh on Observatory 
Hill, and the other Carrollsburgh on James Creek, between 
the Arsenal and the Navy Yard. The site of the city was 
marshes, pastures, dense woods, and some cultivated ground, 
where wheat, tobacco and Indian corn were raised. For 
much of its length Pennsylvania avenue was "a deep morass, 
covered with alder bushes/' Massachusetts avenue traversed 
(on paper) a boggy, undrained wilderness. Oliver Wolcott, 
Secretary of the Treasury, said that you might look in al- 
most any direction over an extent of ground nearly as large 
as the city of New York without seeing a single fence, or 
any object except brick kilns and temporary huts for labor- 
ers. Another disgusted statesman described the embryo 
city of 1800 as "a mud-hole almost equal to the great Serbon- 
ian bog." 

The Capital of 1900 is approximately before our eyes and 
does not need detailed description. Upon these swamps 
and pastures has arisen America's most attractive city, in 
percentage of smooth street surface foremost among the 



38 

municipalities of the world; adorned with imposing public 
buildings and with private residences of the most varied 
and pleasing architecture; a forest city with a hundred thou- 
sand shade trees; a city of parks and small reservations, 
made beautiful by the landscape gardener and the sculptor; 
a city fast creating a model rapid transit system, and in 
many other branches of municipal development approach- 
ing the ideal. 

In 1800 a new nation set up housekeeping in its distinc- 
tive permanent home on the banks of the Potomac. The 
daughters of the family, children of the then recently de- 
ceased confederation, step-daughters of the Union, while al- 
ways welcome at the homestead lived in residences, State 
capitals, of their own. There was another daughter, Colum- 
bia, child of the Union in a peculiar sense, who, like Eve 
from Adam's side, like Minerva from Jove's brain, issued 
from the nation's heart, flesh of its flesh, blood of its blood, 
soul of its soul. Non-existent prior to Union, Columbia 
knew no other life than that derived from the nation, and 
owed no divided allegiance and affection. In her veins the 
national blood flowed purest. 

At birth Columbia was endowed with funds deemed ade- 
quate for her suitable maintenance. But in course of time 
her guardians, some indifferent, some jealous that she em- 
bodied a national power superior to that of her stately sis- 
ters, wasted her maintenance fund, and neglected and abused 
the child of the Union. The circumstances of her birth, the 
equities and the pledges in respect to her support, the un- 
mixed national blood that flowed in her veins were all for- 
gotten. She was ridiculed and despised as a charity child 
by these guardians guilty of a breach of trust. She was 
threatened with destruction, punished and starved. 

As the Cinderella of the family she was compelled to sleep 
among the pots and pans, to make companions of rats and 
mice, and to dress in rags, while her proud State sisters 
flaunted before her their finery. 

But, in due course the fairy godmother appeared. She 
appealed to the memory and conscience of Columbia's guar- 
dians. Her magic wand was "the fine, strong spirit of 
American nationality." At its transforming touch the hum- 
ble surroundings of the modern Cinderella have been glori- 
fied. Dust and vermin and rags have disappeared, and the 
child of the Union (as universally beloved as the Union it- 
self) adorned as becomes her birth and station and natural 
attractiveness, takes her proper place in the family circle, no 



39 

longer despised and neglected, but an object of affectionate 
and admiring regard to everyone in Uncle Sam's household 
who responds to the magic invocation of patriotic national 
sentiment. 

We, assembled here to-night, national legislators and peo- 
ple of the Federal District, are joint partners in the guard- 
ianship of Columbia's interests, and as such are to see that 
the close of a miracle-working century in the history of the 
Nation and the Capital is worthily celebrated. 



Speech as President of the Washington Board of 
Trade at the Annual Shad-bake, May 6, 1899. 

At this year's shad-bake the Washington Board of Trade 
welcomes especially the executive branch of its govern- 
ment. Our Congressional aldermen and common council- 
men, with few exceptions, miss this customary pleasure. 
The saddest result of the present irrational arrangement of 
Congressional sessions, is that our legislators lose every sec- 
ond year this sail upon the Potomac, this pleasing assault 
upon the toothsome shad, with the incidental excitement 
of dodging a superheated sun or occasional showers, and 
of collecting in person May-day reminders in the shape of the 
earnest, persevering tick and the active, wandering ant. 
Above all, they lose the opportunity of communing closely 
with the people of Washington, and thus a new Congress is 
in December precipitated into the most important local legis- 
lation, totally unprepared. 

The executive department forms an integral and import- 
ant part of the Capital's make-up. It adds to the popula- 
tion a peaceful army over twent} r thousand strong, who 
more or less stable in tenure of office during good behavior 
under the merit system, secure homes for themselves and 
families and constitute an intelligent and influential factor in 
the genuine, permanent Washington. The commanders-in- 
chief of this peaceful army from Washington to McKinley 
have been friends, well-wishers and practical promoters of 
the welfare of the nation's city. The affectionate interest 
shown by the great men of the past in the minutiae of the 
Capital's concerns puts to shame the indifference in respect 
to it felt or expressed by some public men of the present^ 
who seem to think it beneath their dignity and an uncom- 
pensated and inexcusable waste of time and of excessively 



40 

valuable brain-matter to concern themselves at all about 
the affairs of the nation's city. 

The river whose broad expanse is spread before us teaches 
an object-lesson on this point. General Washington, at the 
height of his fame, the victorious leader of the American 
revolutionary forces, soon about to become the republic's 
first President, thought it not beneath him to explore in a 
canoe the upper waters of the Potomac in order to increase 
its navigability and to promote its national usefulness. To- 
day our great men neglect even the broad, deep estuary of 
the tide- water Potomac, and permit the guns at Indian Head 
and the Capital's navy yard on the Potomac's main tributary 
to become inaccessible to battleships, and to all vessels of 
great draught. 

The evil results of this neglect of the navy yard and of the 
Anacostia, are especially notable. Here in the early days 
was a noble stream, easily navigable as far up as Bladens- 
burg, which town has been described as a "sea port," and 
which then shipped large quanties of tobacco in commercial 
competition with Alexandria and Georgetown. The Ana- 
costia was wholesome and health-giving, as well as beauti- 
ful, and the land at its confluence with the Potomac, the 
site of Carrollsburg hamlet, was thought to be the most de- 
sirable and valuable portion of the National Capital. Now 
through natural sedimentary deposits, allowed through neg- 
lect to accumulate, and artificially fostered through the per- 
mission of the authorities to construct low, drawless ob- 
structive bridges across the Anacostia, the stream is no 
longer navigable except at its very mouth, and even there 
vessels of large draught may not reach the nation's navy 
yard. No longer a healthful and desirable section, the por- 
tion of the city at the confluence of the streams suffers from 
the marshy flats which, covered with sewage, and exposed 
to the sun at low tide, poison the air, sending disease and 
death to the Navy Yard, Insane Asylum, Arsenal and Capi- 
tal, and to the schools and homes of citizens. The same con- 
ditions and the same neglect which caused the Potomac flats 
developed this nuisance also. The same remedy which Con- 
gress applied to the Potomac problem should likewise be util- 
ized here. There is no just ground of discrimination between 
the two cases. In both the navigability of a large river, con- 
stituting a part of the harbor of the nation's city, is to be 
restored. In both the public health is incidentally conserved 
by the abatement of a nuisance. The fact that the disease 
genus from the Anacostia blow especially upon the legisla- 



41 

tive branch of government, while the Potomac flats, now 
reclaimed, have ceased to infect the White House neighbor- 
hood, should not be a retarding consideration in the recla- 
mation of the Anacostia; Congress, having protected the 
President, should not be permitted to continue, self-sacrific 
inglv, to expose itself to the deady microbes. We must save 
Congress from and in spite of itself. Nor should the ab- 
sence of log-rolling facilities in the case of this broad, well- 
watered stream prevent it from receiving consideration 
among the streaks of moisture which are occasionally given 
legislative existence and supplied with visible water through 
items of appropriation in the river and harbor bill. 

Many other great men besides George Washington have 
taken lively interest in the national city and river. In 1833 
President Jackson strongly urged the construction of an im- 
posing and adequate bridge across the Potomac to replace the 
old Long Bridge, built in 1808 by private subscriptions, which 
had been swept away in part by a freshet. Jackson's plan 
contemplated a noble structure, in part of granite, and was 
to cost between two and five million dollars, according to 
the varying estimates of the engineers. But the spirit of 
false economy in Congress finally prevailed even over the 
iron will of Old Hickory. The bridge was rebuilt cheaply 
with the solid causeway embankments, numerous piers, and 
the low-lying structure which from that day have made it 
to Washington a flood-threatening dam. The engineer who 
built it gloomily refused to predict a long life for it, and 
threw the blame for its existence upon a scrimping, short- 
sighted Congress. Periodically, the freshets have broken 
through some portion of the obstruction, often turned upon 
and flooding the city before they succeeded in knocking out 
the dam. Periodically, with asinine persistence, the old 
structure has been restored. Even the great and progressive 
railroad, to which the bridge's use was conditionally do- 
nated in 1870, has not been ashamed to maintain this threat- 
ening nuisance, and it exists to-day in all its dangerous ob- 
structiveness and original ugliness, a disgrace to the rail- 
road, to the Capital, to Congress, and to the whole nation, 
whose historic river is thus defaced and whose city is thus 
•endangered. 

May we not in 1900 rise to the height of Jackson's idea of 
1833? If Jackson could without loss of dignity display this 
deep interest in a bridge across the Potomac, may not any 
public man of to-day, however lofty, safely pursue a similar 
•course? Could there be a finer opportunity for such a man. 



42 

while still living, to erect to himself a monument? A me- 
morial to a civilian in the republic must, it appears, be of 
his own construction, like St. Paul's as a memorial of Sir 
Christopher Wren> or modern Washington as a memorial of 
Alexander E. Shepherd. War heroes monopolize apparent- 
ly the public statues erected by a grateful republic. W T hat 
civilian then will take up Jackson's uncompleted plan and, 
pushing it to success, build for himself a monument more 
enduring than that of his own figure in bronze or marble? 

The Potomac is practically bridgeless, so far as modern, 
adequate structures are concerned. Its mile expanse of 
breadth, crossed only by rickety, ramshackle bridges, sepa- 
rates the north and south, hems in one side the expanding 
Capital and isolates our Virginian suburban settlements. 
The welfare of the nation's city and due respect for the na- 
tion's river, unite in demanding a radical change in these 
conditions. In addition to its practical uses, present and 
prospective, as the cleanser of the city's sewers, as the pur- 
veyor of pure and wholesome water, as its source of a cheap 
and abundant food supply, and as a motive power, which at 
Great and Little Falls shall furnish electricity to run our 
cars and light our streets, the historic Potomac has been 
a political and patriotic factor in the Republic's annals. In 
the early days it played a unifying part like that then and 
now performed by the nation's city itself. It bound together 
the long, narrow belt of Atlantic coast settlements, and 
those of the Mississippi basin, which were separated every- 
where from the seashore population by at least a hundred 
miles of mountainous country, and which apparently looked 
forward to independent existence with an outlet southward 
through the Mississippi rather than eastward to the Atlan- 
tic. The Potomac, one of the world's great rivers, seven 
miles wide at its mouth, pierced the republic at its narrow* 
central point, and extended itself for four hundred miles, 
nearly to the border of the thirteen colonies, and to the tribu- 
taries of the Ohio in the Mississippi basin. Through a sys- 
tem of canals, and up-river improvements, in accordance 
with a plan devised by the far-seeing Washington, it prom- 
ised to the isolated Western settlements another outlet than 
the Mississippi, and suggested a means of communication be- 
tween the two distinct and widely-separated groups of Amer- 
ican communities. For years the Potomac thus kept the 
East and West in touch until at last the railroads took up 
the task and linked the sections with bands of steel. By 
means of the river and the wide-spreading streams which 



43 

united to form it, the nation from its capital extended west- 
ward an arm, a hand and outstretched fingers, and grasp- 
ing the Mississippi settlements held them firmly to the 
Onion. 

As it was thus in the beginning a bond between the East 
and the West, so the Potomac should now be a bond be 
tween the North and South, connecting, instead of separat- 
ing them. While the latter sections were at sword's point, 
in sentiment or in fact, a practically bridgeless Potomac, 
holding them apart, might as a symbol have been natural 
and defensible. But now in the reunion of the States the 
Potomac should re-enact its historic part as a unifier and 
bind together through adequate connecting bridges the once 
hostile sections. 

The grandest and most fitting memorial with which to 
commemorate the centennial of the National Capital and 
the greater America, which a miracle-working century has 
developed, would be a memorial bridge across the Potomac 
to Arlington, whose national patriotic function it should be 
to connect the Union's capital with the State of the late Con- 
federacy's capital, to bridge the watery chasm between the 
sections, to unite the nation's city of the living with the city 
of the nation's dead; a cemetery now truly national since, 
with the bones of those who died to save the Union in Civil 
War have been laid the remains of men from South and 
North, and East and West, who died for the whole great and 
re-united Republic. Let the memorial bridge symbolize this 
reunion, this national expansion and development. 

As the Potomac, rising in the original West and connect- 
ing the northern and southern colonies, through the numer- 
ous tributaries to its waters combined these national ele- 
ments in a majestic stream and broadened and deepened in 
its course until it poured a vast volume into the outside 
ocean, so moves with ever-expanding and beneficent flow 
the great river of American national spirit and influ- 
ence — developed in the mingling of North, South, East and 
West in the nation's city on the banks of the Potomac; 
quickened by the memory of the great man, who, living 
though dead, influences the world from Mt.Vernon; strength- 
ened by the sacrifices of the patriots who died for the Union 
in the sixties and the nineties, who still speak to America 
though buried at Arlington; combining into one stream the 
ever-increasing influences of the nation's city of the living 
and of its cities of the dead, and pouring this vast whole- 



44 

some and vitalizing volume into the thought and tendencies 
to action of the outside world. 

The man who lies at Mt. Vernon died as a creator of the 
Union. Those resting at Arlington died for the sake of that 
Union. At the confluence of the Anacostia and the Potomac 
live representative Americans who are developing the Union 
of to-day — the greater America — into the dominant force in 
one hemisphere and a power for good in all the world. Let 
the men of the nation's city so live and so act that the Union, 
for which the men of Arlington and Mt. Vernon died, shall 
strengthen and expand, and more and more from year to 
year shall perform the grand functions and fulfill the divine 
purposes for which it was created. 



Report as Chairman of the Committee on Public 
Library of the Washington Board of Trade, March 
27, 1894. 

"Why is there not a majesty's library in every county 
town? There is a majesty's jail and gallows in every one." 
The reproach of Carlyle's question of more than half a cen- 
tury ago has been in large measure removed in England 
through the series of public libraries acts; and in New Eng- 
land, also, and in many States of other sections of the Re- 
public, majesty's libraries — libraries of the American maj- 
esty, the people — are far more numerous and conspicuous 
than the jails. The school and the library, twin agencies of 
education, lessen the need for the prison, and push it into the 
background. 

AN EDUCATING AND CIVILIZING AGENT. 

To-day there is general recognition of the important edu- 
cational position of the free circulating library and reading- 
room, accessible at hours when their treasures can be uti- 
lized by students, both from schools and colleges, and from 
among the working people, whose daylight hours are largely 
occupied in bread-winning. Especially are such libraries ap- 
preciated in this land of free schools. In State after State, 
responding to the popular demand for these educating and 
civilizing agencies, has legislation been enacted to supply 
each little municipal subdivision at the taxpayer's expense. 
So notable has been this movement that it has been reason- 



45 

ablv predicted that the last quarter of the nineteenth century 
will go down in history as the age of electricity and free 
libraries. The progressive community needs the public 
library as it does the telegraph and telephone. It is on the 
same footing with the common school; it is the free uni- 
versity of the people. In the public school a liking for books, 
a desire and thirst for knowledge, may naturally be acquired. 
The library develops this liking and meets and gratifies this 
desire. The school imparts the ability to educate one's self 
by the intelligent use of books. The library supplements this 
instruction by providing the means and opportunity for such 
self-education. As Commissioner W. T. Harris, of the 
Bureau of Education, has aptly stated: "The school teaches 
how to read — how to use the printed page to get out of it all 
that it contains. The library furnishes what to read: it 
opens the storehouse of all human learning. These two are 
complementary functions in the great work of education." 

The library is, then, a true university, both for the grad- 
uates of the public schools and for the whole people, without 
regard to class, or sex, or age, or wealth, or previous condi- 
tion of servitude to ignorance. The people eagerly avail 
themselves of the educational opportunities offered by the 
public library. It raises the whole community to a higher 
intellectual plane. It is also not without its beneficent in- 
fluence as a moral agent. In some of the small New Eng- 
land towns the record shows that as many as one out of 
every five inhabitants, counting men, women, and children, 
is registered as a borrower of library books. More persons 
have there registered to read than have registered to vote. 
The statistics also show that, at first, fiction was most largely 
drawn upon by such readers, but that, as the taste for read- 
ing was developed, stronger food for the mind was demanded, 
and the ratio of serious reading steadily increased. The 
reading-room has proved and will prove a strong rival to all 
demoralizing resorts in claims upon the evenings of many, 
especially the young, and has served and will serve more and 
more as a satisfactory substitute for nightly idleness in 
dreary lodgings or on the streets. 

WASHINGTON HAS NO FREE PEOPLE'S LIBRARY. 

What Carlyle sought for each English county town, and 
what many English and American villages now enjoy, the 
National Capital lacks and seeks to obtain. It is fast becom- 
ing the Republic's educational center. Universities are 



46 

founded in rapid succession within its limits. But the great 
free library university, for those whom Lincoln lovingly 
called the common people, is yet to be created. According 
to the statistics there are much more than a million books in 
the semi-public libraries of Washington — about a twentieth 
of all in the Republic; and when these have been apportioned 
among the citizens after the methods of statisticians it ap- 
pears that the District workingman has fourteen times as 
many public books as the average American. And the only 
difficulty is that he cannot possibly make any use of them 
whatsoever. 

The resident in the more elevated sections of Washington 
who could get no water on the upper floors of his house, and 
very little on any floor, saw countless gallons wasted in the 
departments, in fountains and otherwise, and learned from 
statistics that he and the other citizens were, in per capita 
average of gallons daily used, among the largest con- 
sumers of water in the country. The population of the 
Capital, credited with fourteen times their due proportion of 
books, and without a single available lending library with 
reading-roooms open at night, without even the command 
of books enjoyed by the working people of little Northern 
and Western towns, detect a similar mockery in the library 
statistics. No satisfactory substitute either for actual water 
or actual books is furnished by complimentary statistics. 

WANT AMIDST PLENTY. 

The departmental libraries at the Capital contain nearly 
three hundred thousand volumes, accessible only to a few 
employees of the Government, and closed to them early in 
the afternoon. The vast wealth of reading matter in the 
Congressional Library is practically out of reach of the 
workingmen and school children, owing to the hours of open- 
ing and closing and the conditions placed upon the enjoy- 
ment of its privileges. Not one of the great Government 
collections is open in the evening, when alone the great mass 
of the people can use the books. There are fifty-two libraries 
in the District, each containing over one thousand volumes, 
and not one of them is a free lending library, with a reading- 
room open at night for the benefit of the general public. 
Such an institution is the most urgent need of the National 
Capital. Viewing this ocean of more than a million books, 
spread tantalizingly before them, the workingmen, the school 
children, the Government clerks, the great mass of the citi- 



47 

zens of Washington, thirsty for the knowledge which comes 
from reading, may well exclaim with the Ancient Manner: 
"Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink!" 

A great national reference library for the world's scholars 
does not prevent in other capitals the existence of numerous 
popular libraries, and should not in Washington. "In Lon- 
don, where the British Museum, with its vast library of over 
two million volumes, is still sacred to scholars, there are 
thirty local libraries, in addition to many special libraries, 
open to various classes of students. In Paris, where the 
great national library is only open to readers well armed 
with credentials, there are sixty-four popular libraries, while 
Berlin has twenty-five." 

THIRTY-THREE THOUSAND CHILDREN DEMAND A FREE 

LIBRARY. 

To meet the absolute necessity of books as working ad- 
juncts in the public schools, small libraries have been formed 
in connection with some of the buildings, and the High 
School has a very creditable collection. But to complete 
and perfect its educational system, already so admirable, by 
adding the people's free university to the free school, Wash- 
ington absolutely needs the proposed public library, as an aid 
to the development of intelligent men and women, the good 
Americans of the future, the pillars of the Republic. Its 
creation is demanded in the name of the 63,000 children of 
school age in the District, and especially in the name of the 
33,000 of this number who are over twelve years of age. 

TWENTY THOUSAND GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES DEMAND 
A FREE LIBRARY. 

Investigation of the departmental libraries shows that a 
very large percentage of their three hundred thousand vol- 
umes is composed of technical books and books of reference, 
which have a direct bearing on the work of the department 
which possesses them; that there are only between twenty 
thousand and thirty thousand volumes suitable for a general 
circulating library, and these are confined mainly to three 
departments. The Interior Department, with 10,000 vol- 
umes, and the War and Treasury Departments, with ."5,000 
volumes each, possess nearly all these books. The clerks in 
the departments which have no libraries need and demand 
them, and the favored departments need a wider range of 



48 

reading material than the small collection at the disposal of 
each provides. There are, in round numbers, about twenty 
thousand persons residing in Washington who draw salaries 
from the Government. Many of these represent families, 
and the number of readers in this Government constituency 
can therefore be estimated only by the customary multiplica- 
tion of the number of Government employees. In the name, 
also, of this numerous and book-loving element of the popu- 
lation the creation of the proposed local library is demanded. 

TWENTY-THEEE THOUSAND WOEKINGMEN DEMAND A 
FEEE LIBRARY. 

Last, but not least, conies a powerful appeal from the Dis- 
trict workingman. Sometimes, in view of the notable ab- 
sence from the Capital of dirty, noisy factories, which would 
tend to reduce the city's attractiveness as a place of resi- 
dence, the question is raised, ki Is there any such individual 
as the District workingman?'' The census of 1890 discloses 
the fact that, while it is the policy of the Capital to encour- 
age only light and clean manufacturing, like that of Paris, 
over twenty-three thousand adults were engaged in the Dis- 
trict in lines of work which are classed as manufactures, 
omitting from consideration entirely all the other numerous 
forms of labor. Nineteen thousand of these are engaged in 
purely local industries. Over four thousand are discovered 
to be in Government employ, mainly in the Government 
Printing Office and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. 
It appears from this report that there were in 1890 in the 
District twenty-three hundred manufacturing establish- 
ments with a capital of $28, 876,258, paying in wages $14,- 
638,790, using materials costing $17,187,752, and with pro- 
ducts of the value of $39,296,259. 

To the census figures must be added the thousands of 
workingmen engaged in other lines of work not classed as 
manufactures, and then this number must be multiplied, 
since many arc the heads of families, to ascertain the num- 
ber of readers, and, in behalf of this great multitude of peo- 
ple, a. free lending library and night reading-room are now 
demanded, 

ALL WASHINGTON APPEALS FOR A FREE LIBRARY. 

While attention has been called to certain elements of the 
population as standing in special need of library facilities, it 



49 

is to be remembered that only a small fraction of all the peo- 
ple in Washington have the leisure to utilize and enjoy a 
public library during daylight hours, so that practically a 
whole city of 250,000 inhabitants makes this appeal. 

HOW THE BOOKS MAY BE OBTAINED. 

The first need of the free library — books — can easily be 
supplied. The librarian of Congress states that there are 
many thousands of duplicates in the Congressional Library 
suitable for the purposes of this circulating library, which 
can be spared for such use if Congress will consent, and he 
has formally approved the granting of such consent by Con- 
gress. 

The existing departmental circulating libraries might be 
added to these books from the Library of Congress and made 
into a general departmental library, to which the people of 
the District not employed by the Government might also 
have access. The circulating books, numbering between 
twenty thousand and thirty thousand, accessible in the main 
only to the clerks in three of the Departments and acces- 
sible to them only so far as the fraction contained 
in their own library is concerned, would, if col- 
lected in a general departmental library, be opened 
to all the clerks in all the Departments. A great body 
of Government employees would enjoy privileges of which 
they are now entirely deprived. Those now having a depart- 
mental circulating library at hand, instead of being limited 
to its five thousand or ten thousand volumes, would have 
access to more than twenty thousand in the general library, 
augmented by large additions from the Congressional Li- 
brary and by private contributions, which, if the library were 
once started, would undoubtedly be considerable. The 
clerks in the particular buildings in which the circulating 
departmental libraries are now accommodated might suffer 
a trifling inconvenience from the removal of the books for a 
short distance, but catalogues of the library should be in all 
the Departments, and delivery branches established in dif- 
ferent parts of the city. This inconvenience would thus be re- 
duced to a minimum, and as an offset to it would be the finer 
library to which these clerks would have access and the pub- 
lic benefit of a great expansion of the number of readers to 
whom the accumulated books would be available. Other De- 
partments and bureaus than those which now have circulat- 



50 

ing libraries liave applied in some instances and intend to 
apply in others for like privileges. The establishment of a 
general departmental library, open also to the public, would 
save the Government the expensive duplication of books in 
numerous small collections, and would also economize in the 
room space devoted to departmental library purposes. Ap- 
parently the Government and the clerks would profit by the 
project, as well as the population in general of the city. 

When the nucleus of a library properly housed is once ob- 
tained, the collection will certainly grow rapidly through 
private donations of books and money, and when it has dem- 
onstrated its usefulness and the fact that it is appreciated by 
the public some one of Washington's wealthy men may be 
moved by local pride or other good motive to endow it and 
attach to it his name. No citizen could erect to himself a 
nobler memorial. 

WHERE SHALL THE LIBRARY BE HOUSED ? 

It is evident that the books can readily be obtained; the 
difficulty is in securing a habitation for the library. A loca- 
tion in the new City Post-Office has been warmly urged. In 
Senate debate it has been stated that all the space in this 
building will be needed by the General Government; but, 
notwithstanding this announcement, the amount of available 
space in this vast structure will be so great, its location is so 
central, and there is such fitness in housing the library in a 
Government building which is primarily devoted, in name at 
least, to local uses, that your committee recommend that the 
first effort on the city's part be to obtain this location for its 
library. 

If the library can be enabled with certainty to preserve its 
distinct existence while housed under the same roof with the 
great national library, contingencies might arise which would 
render a location in some unused portion of the new building 
for the Librarj T of Congress extremely desirable. There will 
be abundant room in that structure for at least a quarter of 
a century. An extensive reading-room and every library 
facility will be available. The disadvantages of a location 
not sufficiently central may be overcome by the establish- 
ment of branches in different parts of the city, like those of 
the Boston public library. 

Then the advantages of space in the proposed new munici- 
pal building, or in a structure to be donated by some public- 



51 

spirited benefactor yet unknown, have been considered. Your 
committee have thought the wisest course to be to make 
every effort at first to obtain a location in a building already 
authorized or in course of erection, whose construction is as- 
sured. A municipal building, worthy of the city, when it is 
legislated into existence and actually erected, would be nat- 
urally the permanent home of a city library; but we must not 
wait for this event to occur, or for the wealthy benefactor 
aforesaid to appear or be discovered. Delays in securing the 
suggested nucleus of books are dangerous, and every month 
of the people's deprivation of needed library facilities is in- 
jurious. The free library of Washington should speedily 
come into being. It is, therefore, considered wise neither to 
commit the Board to an unchangeable opinion concerning 
the library site nor to suggest postponement of action by 
seeking quarters at this time in some prospective building, 
whose existence is as yet only in our hopes. 

LEGISLATION RECOMMENDED. 

Your committee ask authority to urge upon Congress leg- 
islation which shall create a library of the kind described as 
necessary in this report, with the suggested nucleus of books, 
and in that location w T hich shall appear, after conference 
with the appropriate committees of Congress, to be most 
available. Your committee submit the draft of a bill as a 
suggestion of the general lines of the proposed legislation. 

If only a small fraction of the books in Washington can be 
made accessible to the mass of its people, the city will be 
well supplied. It will no longer starve in an overflowing 
granary. The project of a public and departmental circulat- 
ing library and reading-room, open in the evening, is worthy 
of the strongest and most enthusiastic labors in its behalf. 
It will doubtless receive the hearty support of the Board of 
Trade, of every public-spirited citizen, and of all friends of 
the Capital and its people, who appreciate the fact that a city 
of a quarter million of inhabitants contains men to be con- 
sidered and not merely streets, buildings, trees, statues and 
monuments. 



The campaign for a tax-supported library on the lines of 
the foregoing report was vigorously pushed, and by Act of 
Congress, approved June 3, 1896, the library was established 
on the basis desired. 

The act reads as follows : 



52 • 

"AN ACT To establish and provide for the maintenance of a 

free public library and reading room in the District of 

Columbia. 

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of 
the United States of America in Congress assembled. That a 
free public library and reading room is hereby established 
and shall be maintained in the District of Columbia, which 
shall be the property of the said District and a supplement 
of the public educational system of said District. All actions 
relating to such library, or for the recovery of any penalties 
lawfully established in relation thereto, shall be brought in 
the name of the District of Columbia, and the Commission- 
ers of the said District are authorized on behalf of said Dis- 
trict to accept and take title to all gifts, bequests and devises 
for the purpose of aiding in the maintenance or endowment 
of said library; and the Commissioners of said District are 
further authorized to receive, as component parts of said 
library, collections of books and other publications that may 
be transferred to them. 

Sec. 2. That all persons who are permanent or temporary 
residents of the District of Columbia shall be entitled to the 
privileges of said library, including the use of the books con- 
tained therein, as a lending or circulating library, subject to 
such rules and regulations as may be lawfully established in 
relation thereto. 

Sec. 3. That the said library shall be in charge of a Board 
of Library Trustees, who shall purchase the books, magazines 
and newspapers, and procure the necessary appendages for 
such library. The said Board of Trustees shall be composed 
of nine members, each of whom shall be a taxpayer in the 
District of Columbia, and shall serve without compensation. 
They shall be appointed by the Commissioners of the Dis- 
trict of Columbia, and shall hold office for six years: Pro- 
vided, That at the first meeting of the said Board the mem- 
bers shall be divided by lot into three classes. The first 
class, composed of three members, shall hold office for two 
years; the second class, composed of three members, shall 
hold office for four years; the third class, composed of three 
numbers, shall hold office for six years. Any vacancy oc- 
curring in said Board shall be filled by the District Commis- 
sioners. Said Board shall have power to provide such regu- 
lations for its own organization and government as it may 
deem necessary. 

Sec. 4. That the said Board shall have power to provide 
for the proper care and preservation of said library, to pre- 



53 

scribe rules for taking and returning books, to fix, assess, 
and collect fines and penalties for the loss of or injury to 
books, and to establish all other needful rules and regula- 
tions for the management of the library as the said Board 
shall deem proper. The said Board of Trustees shall appoint 
a librarian to have the care and superintendence of said li- 
brary, who shall be responsible to the Board of Trustees for 
the impartial enforcement of all rules and regulations law- 
fully established in relation to said library. The said libra- 
rian shall appoint such assistants as the Board shall deem 
necessary to the proper conduct of the library. The said 
Board of Library Trustees shall make an annual report to 
the Commissioners of the District of Columbia relative to 
the management of the said library. 

Sec. 5. That said library shall be located in some conven- 
ient place in the city of Washington, to be designated by the 
Commissioners of the District of Columbia upon the recom- 
mendation of the Trustees of said library: Provided, That in 
any municipal building to be hereafter erected in said Dis- 
trict suitable provision shall be made for said library and 
reading room, sufficient to accommodate not less than one 
hundred thousand volumes." 

This act carried no appropriation, and the first mainte- 
nance provision for the library appeared in the act making 
appropriations for the District of Columbia, approved June 
30, 1898, as follows: 

Free Public Library. — For librarian, one thousand six hun- 
dred dollars; first assistant librarian, nine hundred dollars; 
second assistant librarian, seven hundred and twenty dol- 
lars; and for rent, fuel, light, fitting up rooms, and other 
contingent expenses, three thousand five hundred dollars; 
in all, six thousand seven hundred and twenty dollars. 

In pursuance of the law of June 3, 1896, the Commission- 
ers appointed the Board of Trustees therein described, and 
the trustees organized, electing Theodore W. Noyes Presi- 
dent and B. H. Warner Vice-President, first passing the fol- 
lowing resolution: 

••Whereas the municipal library of Washington owes the 
act of incorporation, which is its life, to the unwearied ef- 
forts, great tact and good judgment of Mr. Theodore W. 
Xoyes ; therefore, be it 

['Resolved, That we enter on the first page of our records 
and before all other acts this acknowledgment of our obliga- 
tions to Mr. Xoves." 



54 

On January 12, 1899, in response to the suggestion of Mr. 
B. H. Warner, Vice-President of the Board of Trustees, Mr. 
Andrew Carnegie offered to donate |250,000 for the erection 
of a building for the library, if Congress would provide a site 
and suitable maintenance. 

On March 3, 1899, Congress passed an act to provide a site 
for a building for the Washington Public Library, as follows : 

"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of 
the United' States of America in Congress assembled, That au- 
thority is hereby conferred upon a commission, to consist of 
the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, the officer in 
charge of public buildings and grounds, and the President of 
the Board of Trustees of the Washington Public Library, to 
cause to be erected upon Mount Vernon Square, in the city 
of Washington, in the District of Columbia, a building for 
the use of the Washington Public Library, with funds to be 
contributed by Andrew Carnegie: Provided, That such 
building shall be commenced within twelve months and com- 
pleted within three years from the passage of this act: And 
provided further, That no liability shall be incurred by the 
United States or the District of Columbia for the cost of the 
erection of said building. 

Sec. 2. That said commission shall invite ten architects or 
tirins of architects, of conspicuous ability and experience, to 
submit competitive designs for the said building, upon a 
carefully drawn programme, said competition to be adjudged 
by said commission acting with two other persons to be se- 
lected by the competing architects. The architect, or firm of 
architects, whose design shall thus be adjudged most accept- 
able shall be employed as architect of the building, to act 
under the direction of the office of construction hereinafter 
provided for, and to furnish all designs and drawings re- 
quired for the construction of the building and personal 
services requisite for their artistic execution. Said archi- 
tect shall receive as full compensation for the said designs, 
drawings, and personal services the sum of three per centum 
of the total cost of said building, to be paid from time to time 
as the work progresses; and all designs and drawings' fur- 
nished by him for the said building shall become the prop- 
erty of the District of Columbia. 

Sec. 3. That the construction of said building shall be 
placed in charge of an officer of the Government especially 
qualified for the duty, to be appointed by the aforesaid com- 
mission, who shall receive for his additional services an in- 






55 



crease of forty per centum of his present salary, to be paid 
out of any available funds, and lie shall disburse the funds 
under rules to be prescribed by the said commission, make 
all contracts, and employ all necessary personal services not 
herein otherwise provided for." 

Mr. Carnegie subsequently increased his donation to $300,- 
000, and the commission created by the foregoing act is pro- 
ceeding with the arrangements for the erection of the build- 
ing. 



NOTES OF TRAVEL IN MEXICO, 
HAWAII, AND JAPAN. 



MEXICO'S WONDERS. 



Extraordinary Diversity of Sights for the Curious— 
The Kaleidoscope of Aztec Land— An American 
Combination of Spain and Egypt— Discomforts and 
Charms. 

(Editorial Correspondence of the Evening Star, Dec. 7, 1895.) 

When the curious but ease-loving traveler wishes to in- 
dulge in polar exploration without risk of freezing or starva- 
tion, of eating or being eaten by his fellow-explorers, of 
smashing aluminum boats or of falling from a pole-bound 
balloon, he follows, in a comfortable steamer, the warm, ice- 
melting gulf stream to the North Cape of Norway and to 
Spitzbergen. When the same traveler wishes to penetrate 
the tropics without exposing himself to sunstroke, to fever, 
to savage cannibalistic tribes, to dwarfs shooting poisoned 
missiles, or even to the horrors of seasickness, he now glides 
down the mountain backbone of the continent in a railroad 
car to southern Mexico, far into the torrid zone, at an alti- 
tude which saves him from equatorial dangers and renders 
it possible, through rapid descents in short excursions to 
the right and left, to taste, with impunity, the full delights 
of the tropics. 

I have recently enjoyed a rapid tour of this sort in Mex- 
ico, visiting the principal cities and the notable sights of 
the great central plateau, at an average height above the 
level of the sea exceeding that of the summit of Mount 
Washing ton, — diverging to the left as far as picturesque 
and semi-tropical Orizaba, only eighty miles from the Gulf 



01 

of Mexico, with its Swiss mountains, mountain torrents and 
picturesque buildings, and its Javanese coffee, palms and 
bananas, — diverging to the right as far as attractive and 
prosperous Guadalajara on the Pacific slope of Mexico, with 
its lake, its waterfall, "the Niagara of Mexico," and its canon 
that boasts the temperate zone at its top and the torrid zone 
at its bottom; and pushing southward as far as Oajaca and 
the famous ruins of Mitla, also in the vicinity of the Pacific, 
and many miles nearer to the equator than is the second 
cataract of the Nile. 

WONDERFUL DIVERSITY OF SIGHTSEEING. 

The principal plateau city is of course Mexico, a great 
modern capital of nearly 400,000 population, the center in 
succession of Aztec, Spanish-American and Mexican civili- 
zation, and wonderfully interesting, both from what it is 
and from what has been preserved of the striking evidences 
concerning what it has been. But there are on the plateau a 
half-dozen other distinct types of city, as, for instance, beau- 
tiful Puebla, the cathedral city; unique Guanajuato, a typ- 
ical mining town, and Aguas Calientes, the Arkansas Hot 
Springs of Mexico. I doubt wmether anywhere else in the 
world so short a distance of travel can display a more strik- 
ing diversity of sightseeing. There are exhibited the char- 
acteristic spectacles of the torrid, temperate and frigid 
zones; here the tropical jungle, the palm, the bamboo and 
the banana; there the coffee, or the maguey, Indian corn 
and beans; then the cactus of the arid wastes of the Mexi- 
can desert, and, finally, the ice-plant of the glaciers of Ori- 
zaba or Popocatepetl, volcanoes crowned with perpetual 
snow. In historic associations and relics of the past there 
is the same diversity. There are reminders of Diaz, of 
Juarez and Maximilian, of General Scott and Santa Ana, of 
Spanish viceroys and Hidalgo, of Cortes and Montezuma, 
and of the unknown builders of pyramids and palaces, that 
antedate the beginnings of recorded history in America. 
Among the men of the Mexico of today there is in appear- 
ance and customs a similar diversity. There are a few 
hundred men of vast wealth and millions of paupers; there 
are feudal lords and vassals, and there are types represent- 
ing or suggesting the proud Spaniard and the pliable 
Egyptian, the Ethiopian and the Mongolian. 



58 

MORE FOREIGN THAN EUROPE. 

Mexico is more foreign in appearance than nine-tenths of 
Europe, the thoroughfares of which are well trodden by the 
tourist myriads, and which has few by-ways remaining to 
gratify curiosity with the new and strange. Mexico's twelve 
millions of natives are, speaking generally, either pure In- 
dian, direct and unadulterated descendants of the Aztecs 
and other Indian tribes, or mixed Indian and Spanish, or 
(much the smallest class) pure Spanish. Four-fifths of the 
people have some Indian blood, two-fifths are pure Indian, 
and about one-third can neither speak nor understand Span- 
ish, and use their original Indian dialects. In the outward 
appearance of the men, women and children and in their 
habitations, costumes and habits it suggests in its different 
sections and among its varied peoples now Europe in Moor- 
ish Spain, now Asia in Palestine, now Africa in Egypt. 

SPANISH SUGGESTIONS IN MEXICO. 

The large cities are Spanish, with low, flat-roofed homes 
of the Moorish type, bare and forbidding without, but built 
around courts often rendered attractive by fountains, flow- 
ers, statuary and singing birds. Iron gratings at the bal- 
conies shut out the lover from the dark-eyed Mexican seno- 
rita, as they do in the case of her Spanish sister, and both 
young women are, unhappily, discarding the picturesque 
mantilla for the latest Paris fashion and spoiling their com- 
plexions with Parisian rouge. 

The Mexican horseman is even more dashing and pic- 
turesque than his Old World counterpart. As in Spain, the 
city's heart is often a plaza, a promenade park, with a stand 
for Sunday band music, with the cathedral facing the plaza 
on one side and tin 4 palace or other Government building on 
the other. In both countries no city is complete without a 
paseo, the Sunday afternoon driveway, where all the world 
displays itself in its best bib and tucker, and a bull ring, 
where also on Sunday the national sport attracts the multi- 
tude. Mexico's churches, like Spain's, are notable for size 
and beauty; for masterpieces of painting and treasures of 
gold, silver and precious stones within, and for beggars 
at their doors. When the Spanish conquered this country 
iis surface was dotted with countless Aztec temples. The 
order given was to tear down every one of these structures 
and to rre<< in its place a Phristian church. 



59 

Thus it results that there are churches today in the fipost 
inaccessible spots, on the summits even of the pyramids, the 
vast artificial mounds, which formed the favorite founda- 
tion of temples of Aztec sun-worshipers; and thus it also re- 
sults that the church edifices are numerous beyond concep- 
tion, though many of the old buildings have long ago been 
disused and have fallen into ruin. The City of Mexico has 
even now sixty churches, and Puebla, the sacred city, with 
less than a hundred thousand population, has quite as many. 
Not only are these religious structures notable for their 
number, but many of them are impressive in size and archi- 
tecture and rich in adornment. They were founded by Span- 
iards in a cathedral-building age, and were constructed ac- 
cording to the plans of Spanish architects, at a time when 
Mexico was pouring countless millions into the lap of Spain, 
and when there was no deterrent in lack of money to the 
most extravagant building projects. When church property 
was nationalized by Juarez, and monasteries and nunneries 
were suppressed, it was found that three-fourths of the re- 
public's entire property was in the hands of the church. 
The wealth, and. to some extent, the rich adornment of the 
churches were affected by Juarez's reform, but still today 
^hese structures are, as in .Spain, the country of notable ca- 
thedrals, the sights most proudly displayed to the tourist. 

ameeica's biggest cathedral. 

The cathedral of the City of Mexico is to be compared in 
size with the vast cathedral of Seville, and that of Puebla 
in beauty of interior adornment with the best of Spain. The 
only church in the world that unmistakably and notably ex- 
ceeds in size the Mexican cathedral is St. Peter's at Rome. 
The Seville cathedral is 398 feet by 291 feet, and the nave is 
134 feet high. Baedeker gives the Mexican cathedral's di- 
mensions at 125 feet by 200 feet; height, 185 feet; towers, 
218 feet high. The Mexican cathedral is thus higher and 
longer than that of Seville, but not so wide. The Seville 
structure occupies a larger ground area, but a part of that 
vast building has fallen in, and is practically a ruin, in the 
hands of repairing workmen, who will be engaged upon it 
for years and perhaps centuries. Meanwhile this portion of 
the cathedral is inaccessible and spoils the effect of an in- 
terior view of the structure. According to Baedeker's fig- 
ures, the Mexican cathedral ranks in size in the class of 
Seville and Milan, surpassed only by St. Peter's, and sur- 



60 

passing not only all the other Spanish cathedrals, but every 
other in the world, including St. Paul's, London; St. Sophia, 
Constantinople, and the Cathedral of Cologne. The Mex- 
ican cathedral, which was nearly a hundred years in build- 
ing, is also notable as having once boasted the richest altar 
in the world, and as being now unique in possessing a choir 
railing said to have cost a million and a half dollars, and a 
wooden floor which certainly did not cost as many cents. 

The Puebla cathedral, with its floor of colored marbles, 
its rich and artistically attractive high altar of different va- 
rieties of Puebla onyx, and the beautiful ironwork and wood 
carving about the choir, boasts an interior which equals 
that of the cathedral of Toledo, or Burgos, or Leon, or any 
other of the structures of which Spain is justly proud. The 
music at Puebla was also pleasing. An organ, a piano, a 
violoncello and other stringed instruments, and men's and 
boys' voices (choir in vestments and director with baton), 
combined with excellent results. These boy choirs in scarlet 
and white vestments were also found in Oajaca's and Tla- 
colulu's cathedrals in the far south. There is a magnificent 
display of silver in remote Tlacolula's church; Tlaxcala has 
the oldest church in North America, with its cedar beams 
brought from Spain, Cortes' church of San Francisco, con- 
structed in 1521; there is artistic wood carving by Indian 
artists of power and taste in the Church of Ocotlan, perched 
upon a hill in the same city of Tlaxcala, and almost every 
leading church of almost every considerable town has a 
treasure of some sort, a Murillo, an alleged Titian, or some 
other exhibit to interest the sightseer. 

COUNTERPARTS OF SPANISH CITIES. 

Not only have many individual Spanish sights their coun- 
terparts in Mexico, but even the cities may be grouped and 
compared. The City of Mexico is nearly as large as Madrid 
or Barcelona, and far surpasses both in novelty and interest. 
Outside of its wonderful picture gallery — the finest in the 
world — Madrid is only an imitation Paris. Barcelona is a 
bright, attractive modern business city. Mexico is all of 
this, and in addition interests with Oriental scenes and sug- 
gestions. It has many of the sightseeing attractions of 
Madrid, Barcelona and gay Seville, with touches of scenes 
from the streets of Cairo. Guadalajara and Puebla are 
nearer the size of Seville, and each has manifold attractions. 
Guanajuato is the Mexican reminder of Toledo and Granada, 



61 

perched on the rocky hillsides, terraced, quaint and pic- 
turesque. 

You hear the same language spoken as in Spain; you pay 
separately so much for each act at a theatrical performance 
in both countries; the male citizens (and some of the citi- 
zenesses) smoke constantly and everywhere, as in Spain, but 
the Mexican does not stare quite so hard at the ladies as the 
Spaniard does, nor does he make such ostentatious and juicy 
use of a toothpick between courses at table d'hote. 

In some of the Mexican homes there are reminders in 
architectural effects and in stucco work in horseshoe arches 
and graceful columns of the Moorish influence upon the 
Spaniards during the period of Moorish occupation of Spain, 
but Mexico has nothing to compare with the delicately beau- 
tiful relics left by the Moors in the Alhambra at Granada, 
and in the Alcazar at Seville, which, with the wonderful 
Moorish mosque at Cordova, constitute the chief attractions 
of Southern Spain. If, however, Mexico has not relics of the 
work of North Africa, it has in its Indian dark-skinned peo- 
ple reminders of the Africans and Asiatics themselves. In 
the small villages and country sections where the millions 
of Indians dwell, Oriental scenes are plentiful. I do not 
now refer to observed analogies in traditions and religious 
rites, in chronological systems and zodiacal signs, or in so- 
cial usages and manners upon which the argument for be- 
lief in the common origin of early Mexican and Old World 
civilization is based, but to the surface resemblances which 
impress themselves upon and interest the ordinary unscien- 
tific observer. 

HINTS OF THE ORIENT IN MEXICO. 

The dark-skinned men, with bright eyes and white teeth, 
dressed first in white cotton and then draped in a serape, 
a shawl by day and a blanket by night, are distinctively 
Oriental, and the effect is not destroyed either by the im- 
mense sugar-loaf sombreros which they wear upon their 
heads or the sandals which, when not barefooted, they fasten 
upon their feet. 

The women, often in gay colors, and draped in a dark-col- 
ored shawl, called reboso, which half conceals the face, also 
suggest Asia or Africa rather than America or Europe. The 
Egyptian shaduf finds its counterpart in the well sweep of 
Irapuato, where strawberries are grown and sold every day 
in the year, and where irrigation is resorted to as in Egypt, 



62 

systematically and on a large scale. In the absence of trees 
and rocks the Egyptian shaduf is small, is composed of pre- 
pared timbers, and the counterpoise to the well bucket is an 
immense hunk of dried, hardened Nile mud. The Mexican 
shaduf generally utilizes a forked tree, and swings across 
it a long tapering tree trunk or branch, and the counter- 
poise consists of a large single stone or a mass of stones 
fastened together. Though Mexico stretches farther south 
than Egypt, the two countries lie, speaking generally, be- 
tween the same parallels of latitude, but the altitude of 
lrapuato is over 5,000 feet above the sea level or the level 
of the Nile, so that the same degree of undress is not ex- 
pected or found in the Mexican as in the Egyptian shaduf 
worker. I saw, however, in the neighborhood of lrapuato 
two Indians at well sweeps working side by side, who were 
dressed only in white cotton loin cloths, and who looked 
like the twin brothers of shaduf workers whom I have seen 
and photographed on the Nile. In the tropical altitudes of 
Mexico, and in the hot springs sections, as at Aguas Ca- 
lientes, without regard to altitude, there is at least an 
Egyptian disregard of the conventionalities in attire, and a 
disposition is noted to take a daily fashion hint from the 
Garden of Eden instead of from Paris, the children discard- 
ing even the fig leaf. The water-carrier of Cairo is much 
like his brother of Guanajuato, where a long leathern jar 
is used. The groups about the fountains all over the re- 
public, with jars of rounded pottery borne on the woman's 
head on a protecting turban-like ring, or balanced on the 
man's shoulders, are also Oriental. Corn is ground between 
two stones in Asiatic fashion. 

THE EGYPT OF THE NEW WORLD. 

Egyptian sand spouts are common; also Egyptian types 
of domestic utensils of pottery. The Mexican woman, with 
her baby at her back, securely fastened in the reboso, which 
throws the infant's weight on the mother's shoulders, is to 
be compared with the Egyptian woman, whose "reboso" 
covers her face while the child straddles her shoulders, 
holding to her head, and leaving her hands as unfettered as 
in the Mexican fashion. There are no Egyptian camels, but 
even more numerous donkeys, the patient burros. The In- 
dian villages, whether of adobe or of bamboo, with thatched 
roofs and organ cactus fences, and whether alive with goats, 
donkeys or snarling curs, are African in effect. There are 






63 

Aztec picture writings resembling the Egyptian, the paper 
being made from the inaguey instead of papyrus. The 
Aztecs employed captives on great public works, as in Egypt. 
Mexico thus has pyramids much broader based than those 
of Egypt, though not nearly so high, and idols quite as ugly. 
Gold ornaments, beads, masks and other highly-prized an- 
tiquities are found in the tombs as in Egypt. 

WHEEEIX MEXICO FALLS SHORT. 

There are disadvantages and annoyances on the Mexican 
trip. After crossing the Rio Grande an arid desert waste 
annoys the traveler with heat and dust for many miles. The 
railroad trip to the City of Mexico is, however, not so far as 
to San Francisco, four days and nineteen hours from New 
York, and is quite as comfortable. As in southern Europe, 
the houses and people are, speaking generally, unprepared 
for the cold, and in case of a cold wave both visitors and na- 
tives often suffer. The hotels are, with a few exceptions, 
poor, but they are very much better than the reports con- 
cerning them prevalent in the United States lead one to 
expect. One can fare as well as in Spain. The foreign lan- 
guage is an annoyance to the American who has done little 
European travel. But Americans ought to learn Spanish. 
Next to English it is the language of the Americas, and in 
view of present growing commercial relations and manifest 
destiny Spanish should have the preference over every 
other modern language in our public schools and colleges. 
The worst nuisances that the tourist encounters in Mexico 
will also remind him of southern Europe and the Mediter- 
ranean countries in general in the ubiquity and the excessive 
energy of the insect kingdom. There is not the slightest 
trace of the proverbial Mexican procrastination in the opera- 
tions of the bedbugs, fleas and lice. Whatever they have to 
do, they do promptly and with all their might. The bulk 
of the Mexicans need public schools and soap and water; 
varied industries and insect powder. But today I am con- 
sidering them not in the more serious phases of their condi- 
tions and needs, but exclusively from the sightseeing point 
of view, which discovers pieturesqueness in rags and dirt. 

MEXICAN "BIGGEST THINGS ON EARTH." 

Mexico boasts the richest and most productive silver 
mines in the world; the cradle of civilisation in this conti- 



64 

nent; the ruins and romance of historic and prehistoric 
America; the Garden of Eden, if it was situated on this 
continent, and in the Cholula pyramid the Tower of Babel 
of Indian tradition; the spot where the first known Europ- 
ean set foot on this continent to which he gave his name — 
the place, the coast near Tampico; the man, Americus Ves- 
pucci; the largest meteorite in the world; in the statue of 
Charles IV., on the Paseo, in the City of Mexico, the first and 
according to some authorities the largest bronze ever cast 
in America, and according to Humboldt the finest eques- 
trian statue in the world next to that of Marcus Aurelius 
at Kome; the stoutest tree on the continent and perhaps in 
the world at Tule, 154 feet two inches in circumference, six 
feet from the ground; according to the latest figures, which 
reduce Mount St. Elias and exalt Orizaba, the highest moun- 
tain on the continent; the largest American church build- 
ing in the Mexican Cathedral and the most beautiful in that 
of Puebla; the first pulpit and first church structure in the 
New World at Tlaxcala; the largest bell in America and 
one of the largest in the world in the Mexican Cathedral. 
It is said to be nineteen feet high. The "Monarch of Bells" 
in the Kremlim at Moscow is twenty feet high and weighs 
444,000 pounds, but it is cracked and useless, while Mex- 
ico's bell is sound and serviceable. Finally, Mexico boasts 
the most pretentious theater on the continent. That of 
Guadalajara is an immense structure, with an imposing 
front of numerous columns of the Greek style of architec- 
ture, but it is now excelled by that of Guanajuato, which 
is one of the showiest and most elaborate buildings of the 
kind in the world. It is the sight of Guanajuato. It is un- 
der Government control, and official permit to visit it is 
issued by the Governor of the' State. It has been a dozen 
years in building, at great expense, as if it were a European 
cathedral or an American State capitol or the AVashington 
postotfice. 

They do not hurry things in Mexico. It is the land of 
"manana" — tomorrow. The national coat of arms repre- 
sents an eagle standing on a cactus, with a serpent in its 
mouth. It is popularly known as the bird and the worm, 
and it has been hastily inferred therefrom that the national 
motto reads: "It is the early bird that catches the worm." 
But only a few days of Mexican experience demonstrate 
the fallacy of this interpretation, and suggest that the real 
national motto is either "More haste, less speed," "Some 
day, some day," or "In the sweet bye and bye." 



AZTEC AND SPANIARD. 



In the Footsteps of the Conquering Cortes— Vestiges 
of America's Venice— Unique and Interesting Street 
Scenes in Mexican Cities— Bargain Sales Every Day. 

( Editorial Correspondence of the Evening Star, Dec. 14, 1895. ) 

The American in Spain naturally takes a deep interest in 
the reminders of Columbus. He finds not even the Alham- 
bra more thought-inspiring than the bridge of Pinos near 
Granada, where Queen Isabella's courier, sent by her frofn 
the recently conquered Moorish city, overtook Columbus, 
who was about to quit Spain in despair, and turned him 
back to give "to Castile and Leon a new world." The Amer- 
ican also develops a spontaneous Columbian enthusiasm in 
Palos, with its convent of La Rabida, so intimately asso- 
ciated with the turning point in the career of Columbus, 
and its port, whence the great discoverer sailed; and in Bar- 
celona, from which the most imposing of the many monu- 
ments erected in his honor looks out upon the Mediterra- 
nean, where he was royally welcomed by Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella on the return from his first voyage. 

A similar interest attaches • to Mexican reminders of 
Cortes, the first Old World conqueror of the New, and this 
interest is not diminished by the fact that the associations 
connected with Cortes, w T ho took possession for Spain of 
what Columbus found, are in the land where his fame was 
won, and not in the mother country, where both discoverer 
and conqueror died neglected and humiliated. • 

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CORTES. 

We can trace every stage of the wonderful march of 
Cortes and his handful of followers from the coast near 
Vera Cruz to the City of Mexico. Here, at Tlaxcala, a moun- 
tain town, not far from the present city of Puebla, the Span- 
iards fought with a fierce and warlike mountain tribe which 
soon became the faithful ally of Cortes, saving him more 
than once in times of imminent danger, and sharing the 
military honors of the conquest. In this city, which at the, 



GO 

time of the conquest was compared favorably by Cortes 
with Granada, but which is now the mere shadow of its 
former self — a half-deserted, decaying village — are found 
the most interesting collection of Cortes' relics in all Mex- 
ico. One sees here the banner which accompanied Cortes 
in his memorable inarch, the standard which Cortes pre- 
sented to the Tlaxcalan chiefs who befriended him, portraits 
in oil of the latter, the robes which they wore at their bap- 
tism and the font in which they were baptized, a silken 
embroidery on which is pictured the first battle, between 
the Spaniards and Tlaxcalans; and one can visit the palace 
occupied by Cortes. 

After turning aside with some of the Spaniards to ascend 
Popocatepetl for sulphur to be used in gunpowder, we enter 
the valley of Mexico by way of Amecameca, as Cortes did, 
and gaze with him in astonished and speechless admiration 
upon the magnificent prospect spread before us. 

"In the center of the great basin were beheld the lakes, 
occupying then a much larger portion of the surface than 
at present; their borders thickly studded with towns and 
hamlets, and, in the midst — like some Indian empress with 
her coronal of pearls — the fair City of Mexico, with her 
white towers and pyramidal temples, reposing as it were on 
the bosom of the waters." 

We descend in Cortes' footsteps, and, after a brief halt 
at Ixtapalapa, where, in the palace of Cuitlahua, Montezu- 
ma's brother, the Spaniards were royally entertained, we 
follow Cortes upon the great causeway across Lake Tezcuco 
straight into the City of Mexico. 

HISTORIC POINTS IN THE AZTEC CAPITAL. 

Where the Hospital of Jesus now stands Montezuma 
welcomed the Spaniards, and thence they marched to their 
quarters near the present Plaza Major and cathedral. We 
can rebuild in imagination the vast pile of Montezuma's 
palace, on the site of the present national palace, and the 
suburban castle of Chapultepec, which rose high above all 
other structures, displaying upon the heights which it 
crowned the same venerable cypresses which are admired 
there today. We can imagine the audacious capture of Mon- 
tezuma in his own city and castle, and finally after many 
vicissitudes of fortune the attempt of the Spaniards to es- 
cape from the city on Noche Triste, the sorrowful night, by 
way of the western causeway. We can recreate the terrible 



i>7 

struggle along the dike, aided by structures which mark 
historic points of this exodus. The movable bridge, built by 
the Spaniards as a substitute for draw-bridges, destroyed 
by the Aztecs, stuck fast in the first intersecting canal of 
the causeway, and the second canal could be crossed only 
upon a bridge of dead bodies. At this point now stands the 
ancient church of San Hipolito, upon whose wall is carved 
this inscription: "So great was the slaughter of Spaniards 
by the Aztecs in this place on the night of July 1, 1520, — 
named for this reason the Dismal Night, — that after having 
in the following year re-entered the city triumphantly, the 
conquerors resolved to build here a chapel to be called the 
Chapel of the Martyrs, and which should be dedicated to 
San Hipolito, because the capture of the city occurred upon 
that saint's day." The point in the causeway is also indi- 
cated where Alvarado is said to have made his famous leap 
across a bridgeless canal, using his spear as a pole, and 
breaking all the records for pole-vaulting. Farther out, at 
Popotla, is the Noche Triste tree, under which Cortes is said 
to have wept on the Dismal Night, a tree jealously guarded 
by the Government. The only notable Spanish public me- 
morials preserved in Indian-ruled Mexico thus commem- 
morate a famous slaughter of the Spaniards and the spot 
where the Spanish leader shed tears of mortification and 
grief. 

Having seen Cortes ignominiously chased out of Mexico 
we must imagine him recuperating at Tlaxcala, collecting 
and disciplining a new army, building brigantines to serve 
as his navy on Lake Tezcuco, and finally engaging in a fierce 
struggle with the soldiers of Guatemozin, the new Aztec 
emperor, a heroic figure in the war, and cutting his way 
over the Iztapalapan causeway, back to his old quarters near 
the pyramidal Aztec temple, and to the mastery of the city. 

The story of the conquest of Mexico is the most exciting 
romance ever written. It has not been neglected either by 
the historian or the novelist. As the average tourist in 
Egypt finds an entertaining guide in "Uarda" and "The 
Egyptian Princess," and the visitor to Italy's resurrected 
city delights more in the descriptions found in "The Last 
Days of Pompeii" than in those of Baedeker, so in Mexico 
"The Fair God'' and "Montezuma's Daughter" give to many 
buildings and historic spots still visible and to many views 
which may still be enjoyed a vivid interest which they would 
otherwise lack. It is a fascinating occupation to visit the 
scenes described in fiction and history, and to trace remind- 
ers of an ancient city in the modern successor upon its site. 



68 

THE OLD CAPITAL AND THE NEW. 

The Aztec city of Mexico — Tenochtitlan — was more ex- 
tensive and populous than the present great capital. It was 
the Venice of the New World. It was built originally on 
some islands in the western part of Lake Tezcuco. It 
stretched its habitations on piles out into the shallow lake. 
Canals traversed it in every direction. Canoes as the New 
World gondolas were the ordinary Tenochtitlan vehicles. 
Great causeways of lime and stone, broad enough for a 
dozen horsemen to ride abreast, connected the city on the 
south, the west and the north with the mainland. Canals 
intersected these causeways and were crossed by draw- 
bridges which could be raised in case of danger, thus cut- 
ting off all communication with the inland city. Tenochtit- 
lan resembled in location and means of defense the ancient 
lake dwellings of Europe. It made a Chinese or Cantonese 
use of the surface of the water to sustain human habita- 
tions, not merely in houses on piles, or in house boats, but 
in the famous chinampas or floating islands, which were 
for the most part immense rafts of reeds and rushes, bearing 
several feet of a rich soil from the bottom of the lake. Some 
of these artificial movable islands were two or three hundred 
feet long, sustaining the residence hut of a gardener who 
grew flowers and vegetables in the greatest profusion. 

Modern Mexico is no longer a Venice. The waters of 
Lake Tezcuco have withdrawn until the center of the pres- 
ent city is several miles from its shore. Only a few feeble 
reminders remain to suggest its Venetian days, its cause- 
ways, its canals and its floating islands. 

VESTIGES OF THE AZTEC VENICE. 

One of the most interesting of Mexico's suburban excur- 
sions is to the south to Ixtapalapa and along the Viga canal, 
including Santa Anita and its alleged chinampas. The 
great causeway to Ixtopalapa was that by which Cortes 
twice entered the city across the waters of Tezcuco, the 
first time hailed with demonstrations of welcome by myriads 
of Aztecs, the second the occasion of Tenochtitlan's final 
conquest, greeted by the fiercest and most desperate resist- 
ance. 

The modern trip to Ixtapalapa begins prosaically in a 
little street ear pulled by a single mule. We enter this car 
at Mexico's great plaza in full view of the vast cathedral, 



69 

which takes the place of the pyramid and surmounting 
temple of the Aztec war god. We leave the Plaza Major 
and go southward down the main street of Tenochtitlan, 
which, when Cortes first entered it, was lined on both sides 
with beautiful palaces of red stone, belonging to the Aztec 
nobility, and exciting by their magnificence astonishment 
and unbounded admiration in the Spaniards. But in the 
second entrance — that of the conquest — every one of these 
fortified palaces was leveled to the ground. Near the city's 
limits our street car turns to the left and we are soon paral- 
leling the Viga canal, the last notable vestige of Tenochtit- 
lan's waterways. After a long but interesting ride along 
its banks, over a fine, well shaded road, passing through 
the Indian villages of Santa Anita and Ixtacalco, we turn 
sharply to the left at Mexicalcingo, and are soon in Ixta- 
palapa. Here were the famous gardens of Cuitlahua, Mon- 
tezuma's brother, where he feasted the visiting Spaniards. 
Here also was the home of Guatemozin, the last great Aztec 
emperor. Now gardens and palaces have disappeared, and 
only a miserable, dusty, scantily populated village remains. 

FLOATING ISLANDS AND THE VIGA. 

On the return trip to Mexico we left our street car at 
Santa Anita and took a scow ride in among the chinampas — 
all that remains of the floating islands. If any of these 
islands ever did float it is evident that they are now fastened 
immovably. Workmen were engaged in raising rich soil by 
dredging the bottoms of the intersecting canals and in 
spreading it over the "floating islands," which thus as- 
sumed an artificial appearance and might easily be sup- 
posed, on superficial examination, to rest upon rafts. The 
soil of these artificial gardens is very fertile and grows im- 
mense crops of vegetables and flowers, which form part of 
the lading of the Viga flat boats that supply the Mexican 
markets. 

Returning to the canal we embark in a Mexican gondola 
for a trip down the Viga to Mexico. Our gondola is not 
even an Aztec canoe, but unequivocally and flagrantly a flat 
boat, constructed on the graceful lines of the mud scow. 
We sit under a low awning, which protects us from the sun, 
and our barefooted gondolier, dressed in white cotton and a 
sombrero, poles us slowly down the equally sluggish canal. 
Here we see a picturesque, scantily clad, dark-skinned In- 



70 

dian propelling a small boat laden with fagots. We pass 
hundreds of flat boats on their way to market, piled high 
with vegetables, flowers, wood, hay, fruit and stone. Some 
of the scows are house-boats, and whole families, from the 
infant to the grandfather, live in them. Domestic opera- 
tions are performed in the open air, with a Neapolitan 
abandon and lack of reserve. Here we pass under a low 
stone bridge, and are compelled to throw ourselves flat in 
our boat, with our awning spread upon us. The scenes on 
the populated banks of the canal are as interesting as those 
on its surface. We see women and children in various 
stages of undress washing their clothes or performing their 
personal ablutions. The Viga laundry consists of an equip- 
ment of stones conveniently located on the river bank. Oc- 
casionally we can look up some small intersecting canal and 
see gardening operations upon the modern floating islands 
and small boats filled with natives navigating the ditches 
around them. 

Decidedly, there is now no suggestion of Venice in the 
scene. If several thousand windmills and as many fat cows 
were scattered over the flat landscape the canals might, 
however, enable the scene to recall recollections of Holland. 

OTHER OLD WOELD SUGGESTIONS. 

Though Mexico no longer reposes as an island capital on 
the bosom of the waters and present resemblances to Italy's 
beautiful city of palaces and canals are remote and far- 
fetched, there are many obvious suggestions of the Old 
World in Mexican scenes, a few of which may be noted. 

An Old World superfluity of beggars, for instance, is con- 
spicuously in evidence. 

The Mexican beggars are not to be compared in deform- 
ity with those of Constantinople, or in persistency with 
those of Killarney, but they maintain a fair European ave- 
rage in both respects and suffice to cause the American vis- 
itor who has been "so long abroad" to feel perfectly at 
home in Mexico. Cortes, distinguishing Cholula from other 
Aztec cities, wrote that he saw there "multitudes of beg- 
gars such as are to be found in the enlightened capitals of 
Europe." Since the conquest all the other Mexican cities 
seem to have attained Cholula's distinction and now proudly 
display these evidences of European enlightenment. 



71 



MUMMIES AND THE LIKE. 



In several different places, including Guanajuato, Mexico 
has a display of comparatively modern mummies and of cat- 
acombs. The practice prevails — as in Barcelona and some 
other European communities — of renting tomb space for the 
use of a corpse. In Mexico, if, at the expiration of the orig- 
inal term there is no renewal of the lease, the corpse is 
evicted and dumped into an extensive underground cham- 
ber. If in the dry air the evicted mummifies he stands 
against the wall; if he tumbles to pieces his bones join the 
vast miscellaneous heap. The Guanajuato catacomb is 
ghastly enough to satisfy the most exacting connoisseur of 
the gruesome. 

UNIQUE STREET SCENES. 

Then there are street scenes of a strange and foreign as- 
pect to the American, as, for instance, black street car 
hearses and street car funeral hacks, utilized in the burial 
of the most distinguished men, like the late Romero Rubio, 
Diaz's father-in-law, and at his death a Cabinet officer in 
the present administration. There are also curious street 
signs, rude but vigorous and highly colored pictures depict- 
ing scenes suggestive of the business conducted within, and 
inappropriate names in staring letters as trade-marks, so 
to speak, of the different stores. Imagine, for instance, 
"The Last Days of Pompeii" as a business sign, or "The 
Sacred Heart of Jesus," which is the name of a score of es- 
tablishments, ranging from a saloon to a flour mill. Then 
one enjoys in the streets the spectacle of men embracing, 
each patting the other's back with the hand of the embrac- 
ing arm, the whole performance constituting the national 
form of greeting, as handshaking is with us. The delicate 
patting of this salute has no justification on utilitarian 
grounds. If, instead of patting, the Mexicans were to 
scratch one another's backs, in the self-inaccessible spot be- 
tween the shoulderblades, one could understand the signifi- 
cance of the performance and with good reason commend it. 

Countless porters at the railroad stations ready to carry 
anything from a hand satchel to a Saratoga trunk for the 
smallest of small fees suggest Europe; also the vendors 
who crowd about the windows of the cars at every stopping 
point to sell their wares. The variety of the articles thus 
offered is extraordinarv. In addition to the edibles and 



72 

drinkables, the pulque and the strange fruits, nearly every 
place has some specialty to offer. Thus at Salamanca the 
peddlers have buckskin gloves, at Aguas Calientes linen 
drawn work of a fineness and cheapness to turn the heads 
of lady tourists, at Irapuato strawberries every day in the 
year, at Queretaro opals by the peck, at Celaya famous 
dukes, confections of milk and sugar; at Guadalajara pot- 
tery, at Puebla onyx ornaments, and at Apizaco canes of 
coffee wood curiously and sometimes artistically carved by 
the Indians. 

BARGAIN SALES EVERY DAY. 

These things can not only be bought at the places where 
they are made or grown or found, but at the metropolis, and 
there also can be had cheaply old silver, filigree work, beau- 
tiful straw work, wood carving, feather work keeping alive 
some of the ancient Aztec art, figures in wax and clay, and 
countless other Mexican products, in addition to direct im- 
portations from Europe which have paid little or no duty, 
and American goods, which to meet the vigorous European 
competition are in many lines sold more cheaply than in the 
United States. When it is considered that the depreciation 
of the Mexican silver causes every transaction to appear to 
the American as a bargain sale, with a discount of nearly 

00 per cent., the attractions of Mexico as a shopping place 
at once become notably apparent. 

What lady can resist the opportunity for foreign cheap 
shopping, when she remembers that she may also experience 
the unholy joy (a returning European traveler's emotion) of 
smuggling her purchases across the border and of getting 
ahead of the customs officers and of Uncle Sam? 

While the ladies are shopping the men can, if they please, 
climb Orizaba or Popocatepetl — snow-clad volcanoes, 2,000 
feet higher than Mount Blanc. It is not necessary, how- 
ever, to rule out the ladies in the mountain-climbing trips. 

1 sec that a party of men and women have recently ascended 
Popocatepetl, and that they went from the City of Mexico 
as far as the first stage of the ascent — wonderful to relate — 
on bicycles. As further evidence that Mexico is in many 
respects fully abreast of the times attention may be called 
to the recent newspaper announcement of a projected cable 
road to the very top of lofty Popocatepetl. 



MODERN MEXICO. 



The New North American Invasion Across the Rio 
Grande — One of the World's Great Men — Porfirio 
Diaz, Spanish - Indian President and Uncrowned 
King— Future of the Americas. 

(Editorial Correspondence of the Evening Star, Jan. 4, 1896.) 

The Americans, i. e., the United Statesers, are invading 
Mexico. This invasion differs from its predecessor of half a 
century ago in that it is peaceful and beneficial in the high- 
est degree to the invaded. American enterprise and the far- 
seeing wisdom of Mexico's political leaders have combined 
to develop a comprehensive railroad system in our neighbor- 
ing republic, practically an extension of certain great trunk 
lines of the United States, already covering well the most 
important points and pushing toward the country's re- 
motest corners. Mexico's contribution to the pan-American 
route, which is to convey through passengers from Maine 
or Oregon to Patagonia, and which is to knit together the 
Three Americas, is now near the Mexican southern border. 
The railroads with which the northern invaders have blessed 
this land are developing the rich natural resources of hith- 
erto inaccessible sections, stimulating trade, and bringing 
into the republic an annually increasing host of tourists to 
enjoy the magnificent scenery, the prehistoric ruins and the 
unique scenes illustrating the life of the people, and also 
with ideas of expenditure on a gold basis to scatter depre- 
ciated silver among appreciative recipients. With its twin 
agent of civilization, the telegraph, the railroad has also ren- 
dered revolutions all but impossible. Xo revolt can make 
much headway before the news is flashed to Diaz, and 
through the aid of the facilities furnished by the railroads 
troops may be massed and the rebellion crushed in its incip- 
iency. Mexico's railroads, with a single exception, are 
owned and run by Americans, in accordance with American 
methods of equipment and management. The army of rail- 
road men constitute the first and most important branch of 
the northern invaders, and associated with them are the 



74 

drummers, representing business America, and the tourist 
host. Then come the Americans who, either for themselves 
or as superintendents for Mexican owners, have so wonder- 
fully developed the republic's mineral resources in recent 
years. The coffee lands have also attracted numerous Amer- 
ican investors, some of whom have done well for themselves 
and all of whom have contributed something to the pros- 
perity of Mexico. 

THE UBIQUITOUS AMERICAN. 

Everywhere in the younger republic one meets Ameri- 
cans, here in trade, here in the hotel business, here as tour- 
ists, here introducing some northern invention, as an elec- 
tric plant, into a progressive Mexican city; here in mining, 
here in coffee planting, here in charge of railroad, express 
or telegraph business. But compared with the entire popu- 
lation they are, of course, a mere handful. Their influence 
in Mexico is out of proportion to their number, for the rea- 
son that they have so strong a hold upon the sources of na- 
tional development and prosperity. They are not more 
numerous, because Mexico is not really attractive to those 
colonists who must struggle individually with the soil, the 
class which constitutes the great bulk of home-seeking and 
home-making immigrants. On the plateau the soil is often 
thin and poor; in the hot lands fevers and the competition 
of Indian cheap labor at a maximum rate of 25 cents a day 
in our money discourage immigration. There is more room 
here for the capitalist than for the laborer. It is not a good 
place for the young man to come "to make his fortune," 
without well-defined and reasonable plans of immediate 
employment. Intoxicants are temptingly cheap and the 
moral atmosphere is unwholesome for the voluntary or in- 
voluntary loafer. 

Mexico has not merely railroad ties with the United 
States, but is bound fast by newspaper ties as well. The 
capital city has two good daily newspapers printed in Eng- 
lish, one of which, the Mexican Herald, an enterprising, 
newsy, up-to-date paper, presents to its readers the full As- 
sociated Press reports. The republic is thus in the system 
of American newspapers as well as that of American rail- 
roads, and, no longer isolated, is in touch with the thought 
and action of the North American Continent. 



75 
THE KEIGN OF LAW AND OF DIAZ. 

There was a time when heavy investments of American 
capital in Mexico would have been viewed as impossibilities, 
rendered such by local hostility toward foreigners, and es- 
pecially Americans, and by the lack of a settled, organized 
government to repress lawlessness and to guarantee security 
to invested capital. That stage in the country's history is 
happily passed. Diaz, one of the world's great men, rules 
the republic with a strong, yet tactful hand. He is at once 
a soldier and diplomatist. He welcomes the foreigner with- 
out losing his hold upon his countrymen. He has checked 
the revolutionary tendencies of Mexico, formerly a sort of 
Ferris wheel among nations, notable for the magnificent 
impressiveness of its periodical revolutions. The army is 
back of him, and through the railroad and accompanying 
telegraph which his policy has sent everywhere in Mexico 
he can, as I have already suggested, drop soldiers upon the 
backs of conspirators as soon as they have fairly begun to 
conspire. He has, to a great extent, broken up the elements 
which threaten revolt, conciliating or crushing possible 
conspirators. Many restless, lawless spirits, including the 
surviving remnant of bandits, have been converted into 
"Rurales," the efficient mounted protectors of the public 
peace. Other disturbers have been quieted and rendered 
conservative by appointment to higher offices, or have been 
exiled, or imprisoned, and, in some cases, perhaps, shot 
"while attempting to escape." In one way and another Diaz, 
who was an old revolutionist himself, and who approached 
his task of rendering revolutions impossible with the ac- 
quired knowledge of an expert, has long ago steadied the 
republic and caused his reign, if such it must be termed, 
to be an era of peace and good order and security to life 
and property. 

While in the City of Mexico I had an interview with Pres- 
ident Diaz in the Xational Palace, the vast building which 
occupies a part of the site of the still vaster structure of 
Montezuma's world-famous palace. My sponsor and inter- 
preter was Mr. Butler, the able and genial secretary of the 
American legation in Mexico. The stranger from Wash- 
ington is at once made to feel at home here by the repre- 
sentatives of his Government. Minister Ransom, the courtly 
ex-Senator from Xorth Carolina, and his son Robert vie 
with each other in their tender of hospitable attentions, and 
no one could be apparently on a better footing at the Mex- 



76 

ican White House, or secure for a visitor an interview with 
President Diaz under more favorable conditions. The Mex- 
ican President understands much that is said in English 
and can speak it to some extent, but he protects the Presi- 
dential dignity in these interviews (as is natural) by speak- 
ing only Spanish, and, when necessary, utilizing an inter- 
preter. In conversation with him, however, there is not the 
unavoidable stiffness of the ordinary interview through an 
interpreter. You speak to him and not to the interpreter, 
for you feel that he understands nearly everything that you 
say, and that so far, at least, as your own remarks are con- 
cerned, your Spanish-speaking friend is a commentator 
rather than an interpreter. 

AN INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT DIAZ. 

We found the President in a reception room hung with 
the famous Maximilian tapestries, and he sat down and 
chatted sociably with us for half an hour, apparently obliv- 
ious or careless of the fact that a crowd, including a high 
Government official, cooled their heels in the ante-chamber. 

The interview was not a formal, pre-arranged affair to 
furnish the basis of a newspaper publication, but the Presi- 
dent talked interestingly on many subjects in the course of 
the desultory conversation. 

He evidently appreciates fully the value of the right sort 
of American in developing the material resources of the 
country which he governs. The man who builds and man- 
ages Mexican railroads and the man who develops the re- 
public's mineral wealth are to him the model Americans. 
In this connection he spoke in warm terms of ex-Governor 
A lexander R. Shepherd, who has spent great sums of money 
in making highly profitable the mines of Batopilas in north- 
ern Mexico. President Diaz inquired particularly as to Mr. 
Shepherd's whereabouts (he was then in Europe), and said 
that he had at least two American friends in whom he could 
place at all times the fullest and most unquestioning reli- 
ance. One of them, he said, was Shepherd, and the other 
Huntington, the railroad magnate. 

Admiration was expressed of the wonderful view from 
the residence White House of Mexico, lofty Chapultepec, 
and of the Paseo or driveway leading to it, with its mag- 
nificent statues of Gruatemozin, Columbus and Charles IV. 
Diaz did not display any special enthusiasm on the subject 
of natural scenery. He intimated that so far as these par- 



77 

ticular scenes were concerned, they were so familiar to hirn 
that he had come to take them much as a matter of course. 

In response to a complimentary reference to the good 
order prevailing today in Mexico, Diaz spoke freely upon 
the subject. He was evidently pleased and proud at what 
he had already accomplished in this direction, but in view 
of the comparatively recent date of the full supremacy of 
the law he deprecated an expectation of precisely the same 
settled conditions everywhere in that republic which he 
assumed to exist everywhere in the United States. 

Questioning as to the possibility of a visit by him to the 
United States, I asked whether he was prohibited from go- 
ing outside of the republic's jurisdiction during his term 
of office. He replied that the rule on that subject had been 
even more stringent than at present; that when he first be- 
came President the law made of that official a prisoner 
within the federal district, forbidden to step foot outside 
its limits; and that he finally succeeded in securing the 
amendment of this law, so that now he can visit any part of 
Mexico, though he may not go beyond its borders. He 
added dryly that the Mexican Presidents were not inclined 
at any time to view this confinement, so to speak, as a pun- 
ishment, and intimated that anyone in the past who was 
so fortunate as to hold the Presidency was apt to prefer to 
stay close to the seat of Government in order to be sure of 
retaining it. 

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PRESIDENT. 

Diaz is an older man, a smaller man physically, though 
strongly built, and a much darker man than photographs 
and paintings of him had caused me to expect to meet. He 
is sixty-five years of age, though he looks considerably 
younger, and the Indian blood in his veins, of which he is 
proud, imparts a decided shade to his complexion. He gives 
the impression of a man of great force, but with powers 
under perfect restraint. He seems what he is generally con- 
ceded to be, "The right man in the right place." He has 
been the power either on the throne or behind the throne 
since 1877, and he will reign, all elements of the people en- 
thusiastically assenting, as long as he lives. It is also ex- 
pected that he will exercise the kingly prerogative of select- 
ing his successor; indeed, the name of the man supposed 
to have been chosen for this honor is already whispered in 
the inner circles. 



78 

Diaz is of the mixed Spanish and Indian race which con- 
trols Mexico. The oppressions by the mother country ap- 
parently soured the Spanish blood in Mexican veins. De- 
scendants of the Spanish conquerors fought by the side of 
descendants of the conquered Aztecs against Spain as a 
common enemy. Irrespective of ancestry they merged into 
the Mexican-American. It is curious how the see-saw of 
time and fate has sent the murdered Guatemozin up and the 
conquering Cortes down in Aztec-Spanish land, Guatemo- 
zin's bones have moldered undiscovered somewhere in the 
vast forests of Central America, where Cortes hanged him, 
or they would occupy the place of honor in Mexico's Pan- 
theon. The most impressive statue in the Mexican capital 
is the magnificent representation of Guatemozin on the 
Paseo, reverenced by the Indians, and erected and admired 
by men with the blood of the Spanish conquerors in their 
veins. The companion piece to Guatemozin's statue on the 
Paseo is not Cortes, the conqueror, but Columbus, the dis- 
coverer, who is apropriately honored in this part of the New 
World. As for Cortes, not only is he uncommemorated in 
tablet or monument, but rancorous hatred did not even per- 
mit his bones to rest undisturbed in their Mexican tomb. 
"In 1823," says Prescott, "the patriot mob of the capital in 
their zeal to commemorate the era of the national independ- 
ence and their detestation of the 'old Spaniards,' prepared 
to break open the tomb which held the ashes of Cortes and 
to scatter them to the winds! Friends of the family, as is 
commonly reported, entered the vault by night, and, secretly 
removing the relics, prevented the commission of the sacri- 
lege." 

A WELCOME TO HOSPITABLE GBAVES. 

This treatment of Cortes is a curious exception to the 
general amnesty and the policy of toleration which Mexico 
seems to have declared in respect to the dead who in life 
figured conspicuously in her history. She has apparently 
been content to welcome even the most hated to a hospitable 
grave. Under the Altar of the Kings in the Cathedral of 
Mexico molder together the bones of certain Spanish vice- 
roys, and the heads of certain patriot Mexicans, including 
Hidalgo, struck off by the Spanish as the heads of traitors. 
Close at hand in the Chapel of San Felipe lie the remains 
of Iturbide, who destroyed Spanish rule in Mexico, made 
himself emperor, was finally shot by the patriot Mexicans 



71) 

as a traitor, and, being dead, reposes in the cathedral under 
a monument inscribed u The Liberator." 

In Mexico's Westminster, the Pantheon of San Fernando, 
lies Juarez, the famous Indian President, under a tomb 
which is a masterpiece of sculpture, and only a few feet 
away are the monuments which mark the last resting places 
of Miramon and Mejia, the generals of Maximilian, who 
were executed with him at Juarez's order. At the foot of 
Chapultepec rises a monument to the Mexican cadets killed 
in the assault by the North American invaders. In the for- 
eign cemetery at its end toward Chapultepec lie the bones 
of the American soldiers killed in the invasion, and on their 
monumental shaft is inscribed their victories: "Contreras, 
Churubusco, Molino del Rey, Chapultepec, Mexico." No one, 
it seems, is begrudged a hospitable grave but Cortes! 

In this land of revolutions first one race has been on top 
and then another. For three hundred years the Spanish 
blood was in the ascendancy; now the Indian prevails. The 
Mexican Madonna is the Indian Virgin of Guadalupe, who, 
inspiring the patriot armies, overthrew" and superseded as 
the national patron saint, the Spanish Virgin, de Los Reme- 
dios, in whose name the Spaniards went to battle. It is the 
Virgin pictured as an Indian who was recently crowned at 
Guadalupe, some of our American bishops participating in 
the elaborate ceremonies. Juarez, "the Washington of Mex- 
ico," was a full-blooded Zapotec, and he ruled, and Diaz 
now rules, asserting the supremacy of the Indian through 
their Zapotec blood. 

is Mexico's autonomy in danger? 

Has Mexico reason to fear the invading Americans, even 
though they bear gifts? Not at present, and probably never. 
As a race we are a land-hungry people, but a belt of desert 
and forbidding territory separates us from the desirable 
portions of Mexico. Our colonists do not go there as settlers 
upon the land in dangerously large numbers. Not labor, but 
capital, is needed, and supplied. 

The United States must and will control the successful 
competitor among the canal and railroad routes to connect 
Atlantic and Pacific across the narrow end of the continent, 
but this control does not render necessary annexation either 
of Mexico or of the country traversed by the interoceanic 
highway. 



80 

Millions of the Mexicans are not in condition to be assim- 
ilated in a real republic like the United States. The Gov- 
ernment, though admirable and the one best adapted to ex- 
isting circumstances, is not of and by the people. The elec- 
tions have often been mere forms. The national legislature, 
of which the lower house meets in the old Iturbide Theater, 
with the reporters in a private box and the spectators in the 
galleries, passes entirely too many measures bj a. unanimous 
vote. Four million people, who speak and understand only 
some Indian dialect, and whose needs are so barbarously 
limited that twenty cents a day of our money will satisfy 
them, would be an indigestible lump even for the ostrich 
stomach of the American Kepublic. In many parts of the 
rural districts the conditions of the feudal system prevail. 
The Mexican hacienda is a vast estate, sometimes contain- 
ing hundreds of thousands of acres, with its castle, the fort- 
like central building or house, around which the feudal 
village clusters, with its lord, generally an absentee, enjoy- 
ing himself in Paris, and with its vassals in thousands of 
peons, who are kept chronically in debt to the lord, and who, 
under the laws and customs, are as tightly bound to the soil 
as if slavery and serfdom had not been abolished by law in 
Mexico. From the feudal system of the Middle Ages to 
modern self-government is too sudden a transition. 

Neither the people to the north nor to the south of us are 
now knocking at our doors for admission, and there is no 
tendency toward or present prospect of forcible annexation. 
Canada, outside of the French province, would be readily 
assimilated, and is anxious for commercial but not political 
union. Mexico would not be easily absorbed. Many of her 
people, especially those near the border, are suspicious and 
apprehensive of us. Secretary Seward, who drove out the 
French for them, does not entirely banish from their mem- 
ory General Scott, with his army of North American in- 
vaders. The process of Americanizing both neighbors goes 
on, however, steadily. Canada is likely to secure first com- 
mercial and then political independence of Great Britain 
before there can be peaceable annexation to the United 
States, if that event is ever to occur. With Canada and Mex- 
ico self-governed as republics, and closely bound to the 
United Stales by commercial ties and common interests, 
and with the institutions and influence of the great Republic 
dominating the American continent, manifest destiny will 
have sufficient gratification, no matter how long the repre- 



81 

sentation of Canada and Mexico in the government at Wash- 
ington may be delayed. 

With a pan-American railroad fastening together the 
American continents with bands of steel; with reciprocity 
devices to foster and encourage trade; with legislation to 
develop American shipping and American commerce; with 
consular reports and such publications as those of the 
Bureau of American Republics to guide the manufacturers 
wise enough to utilize them, and with an enlarged and vig- 
orous American doctrine, the modern application and logical 
development of the Monroe doctrine, to unify the hem- 
isphere, the three Americas will advance rapidly together, 
shoulder to shoulder, into a common and unexampled pros- 
perity. 



A KING AMONG TREES. 



Mexico's Giant at Tule Perhaps the Stoutest in the 
World — A Typical Zapotec Village — Scenes in a 
Timbuctoo of the North American Continent — On 
the Way to Mitla's Ruins. 

(Editorial Correspondence of the Evening Star, Jan. 18, 1896.) 

Though spelled Oaxaca and pronounced Warhacker, the 
word sounded tunefully as Eldorado in the ears of Cortes, 
for it was the name of the most fruitful valley and the 
richest gold-producing province in Aztec land. And when 
the Spaniard kidnaped Montezuma in his own palace, and 
ruled through the royal captive, one of the first gifts ex- 
torted from him was the grant to Cortes of a vast tract of 
land in Oaxaca. So after the conquest, when a Spanish 
emperor occupied Montezuma's shoes, this grant was re- 
newed and confirmed, and Cortes was made Marquis of the 
Valley of Oaxaca. The modern Indian-peopled city of this 
name is famous not only as the spot favored by Cortes, but 
as the birthplace of Juarez and of Diaz, as the present ter- 
minus of the Mexican Southern Railroad, and the most 
southern point yet reached in Mexico by the Pan-Ameri- 
can route, and finally as the starting point for a drive to 
the Big Tree of Tule and the ruins of Mitla. 

In front of the worse of the two Oaxaca hotels — any one 
who has been in either of them will at once decide that I 
stayed where he did — there stood on a balmy day in last 
November two vehicles bound for the ruins of Mitla. In 
entire harmony with their uses and their destination they 
were themselves ruins, as unmistakable as any left by the 
Aztecs, Toltecs or Zapotecs. First came a dilapidated car- 
riage, once perhaps the showy turnout of a Spanish viceroy, 
now a sad relic of departed worth, broken, scratched, 
cracked, tattered and torn, worn paintless and threadbare, 
whose doors, held in place by dirty bits of string, clung 
tenaciously when requested to open, and in yielding gener- 
ally splintered the wood work in a fresh spot. The second 
vehicle was even less promising. It was a double-seated 



83 

wagon with springless springs, and in the last stages of 
decay. Each conveyance had as motive power five mules, 
with three leaders abreast, and was driven by a bandit in 
sombrero and serape. 

THE START FOR TULE AND MITLA. 

The little group at the hotel entrance, consisting of Dr. 
Leopoldo Batres, conservator of ancient monuments of Mex- 
ico; his son, a bright youngster; the English engineer; 
Madame and myself, stared at the Mitla procession with 
dubious eyes. Finally Madame, after a critical examina- 
tion and some hesitation, marks the carriage as her choice 
of evils. The English engineer seats himself with our 
driver, Madame and I take the back seat, our driver's whip 
cracks savagely, and off we go for Tule and Mitla. The 
other vehicle containing Dr. Batres and his son, and creak- 
ing ominously under the burden of the conservator's portly 
form, quickly follows. Dr. Batres is to stop at the palace 
of the governor of Oaxaca to get papers from that official 
addressed to the municipal authorities of Tlacolula, and to 
overtake us at the Big Tree. The conservator of ancient 
monuments had a double mission on this trip. He was en- 
gaged in an inspection of the ruins in his charge, in order to 
see that they were in readiness for examination by the Con- 
gress of Americanistas, a society composed largely of Euro- 
peans, which devotes itself to the study of American anti- 
quities, and which was soon to meet for the first time in its 
history in the new w r orld, and in the City of Mexico. Dr. 
Batres was also enlisted in a man hunt, a search for typical 
Zapotecs, to be displayed as ethnological exhibits before the 
same Congress of Americanistas. Inasmuch as he spoke the 
Indian dialects, Spanish and French, and had an intimate 
knowledge from his official position of the ruins visited, he 
proved, as might be expected, a valuable companion on our 
travels. 

Oaxaca has reached that stage of municipal development 
in w T hich the streets are paved with rough cobble-stones, and 
the only unpleasant bits of travel in our excursion were 
within Oaxaca's limits, before the hard, well-beaten dirt 
road of the country was reached. Upon this thoroughfare 
our vehicle moved along smoothly and rapidly, and the pro- 
cession of Indian vehicles and pedestrians which we passed 
on their way to town kept us constantly pleased and in- 



84 

terested. The Oaxaca typical vehicle is an ox-cart, the oxen 
burdened and adorned with rude yokes, fastened to the horns 
and extending backward over the top of the head and neck, 
and the cart lumbering along on clumsy wooden wheels, 
with massive, far-projecting hubs. Sometimes the wheel is 
in a single piece, the section of a tree trunk, and always in 
the rural districts it closely approximates this primitive 
form. 

A GIANT AMONG TREES. 

Seven or eight miles from Oaxaca we turned from the 
main road into a lane running through a grove of trees, one 
of the streets of Tule village, and in less than a half mile 
from this point we came to the church of Santa Maria del 
Tule and the monster tree in the churchyard. As one passes 
through the gateway which pierces the high adobe wall sur- 
rounding the church enclosure, he comes face to face with 
the mighty ahuehuete or Mexican cypress, and the sight 
takes his breath away. The vast bulk of its trunk and 
branches dwarfs into insignificance the church standing 
close by. It seems impossible that this area of vegetable 
growth should come from a single shoot, and the fact that 
the surface of the trunk is not smooth and regular, but is 
deeply indented, with huge ribs standing out at intervals 
like the sails of a giant windmill, tends to strengthen the 
impression that the tree is a composite, a case of vegetable 
Siamese twins, or perhaps the Tule triplets among trees. 
One M. Anza is quoted as saying concerning it in the last 
century that "three united trunks form the famous sabino 
of Santa Maria del Tule." But later travelers do not coin- 
cide with M. Anza, and M. Charnay, the French savant, 
who visited this province when engaged in his world-famous 
investigations in Chiapas and Yucatan, expressly negatives 
this view. With this preface, let us plunge at once into fig- 
ures and announce that according to the latest measure- 
ments (those made by Campbell and given in his Mexican 
guide), the circumference of the trunk six feet from the 
ground, is 154 feet and 2 inches. Some of its branches 
spread out a hundred feet from the trunk, and the height 
of the tree is about 160 feet. 

Jn one side of the trunk is pointed out a wooden tablet, 
over which the bark has grown until it has become almost 
a part of the tree, and a nearly illegible inscription appears 
upon it, said to have been signed and placed there by the 



85 

great Humboldt, who is alleged to have declared that there 
is no other tree to surpass this in the whole world, save a 
certain one which he saw in Africa. The stranger knock- 
ing about in Mexico is apt after a time to find the German 
savant and great American traveler something of a bore. 
Everywhere you run up against some reminder of the ubi- 
quity of the man. If you wax enthusiastic over the view 
from Chapultepec or the Cathedral towers, you soon dis- 
cover that Humboldt has seen it all, and said whatever it 
was most appropriate to say. You admire the statue of 
Charles IV r . on the Paseo, and are told that Humboldt, too, 
thought it was fine, surpassed only by that of Marcus Au- 
relius in Rome. And when the ordinary traveler thinks that 
he has found something new and surprising in compara- 
tively untrodden wilds, Humboldt is thrown in his face in 
a most discouraging fashion. After a while one gets the 
impression that this very comprehensive wanderer and in- 
vestigator of over ninety years ago saw everything Mexican 
that there was to see, walked and rode everywhere, armed 
with barometer, thermometer and other scientific weapons, 
climbed all the heights, measured and pictured and philoso- 
phized upon all the ruins, compared everything with some- 
thing somewhere and some time else, and spared not even 
the Big Tree from his objectionable omnipresence. When 
Walter Wellman finally discovers the North Pole he will 
undoubtedly find Humboldt's name carved upon it, together 
with an inscription stating that the North Pole is unsur- 
passed in its way by anything that Humboldt had ever seen 
except the South Pole, which is loftier, and from which the 
prospect is notably finer and more extensive. 

AS TO TULE, HUMBOLDT NEVER IN IT. 

These reflections under Tule tree, which were reasonable 
certainly at that time and place, were modified somewhat 
when I found later that Humboldt did not compare the 
Mexican tree unfavorably with one that he saw in Africa; 
that (1) his writings do not contain this displeasing com- 
parison; that (2) he had never been in Africa, and that (3) 
according to an intimation of H. H. Bancroft he did not 
visit the Mitla neighborhood during his Mexican perambu- 
lations. 

Can it be that the great Humboldt is a great Humbug — 
the forerunner and model of the modern fake-fabricating 



86 

foreign correspondent? Perish the thought. Humboldt 
visited President Jefferson and Washington city in 1804 
and was warm in his praises of the beauty of the city's 
site. A man who gives such pleasing evidence of good 
judgment and discerning taste cannot be a fakir. 

Humboldt's statements in his Political Essay on the King- 
dom of New Spain concerning the Tule tree, seen or unseen, 
which are made as if of his own knowledge, without refer- 
ence to another as authority, are as follows: 

"At the village of Santa Maria del Tule, three leagues 
east from the capital, between Santa Lucia and Tlacoche- 
guaya, there is an enormous trunc of cupressus disticha 
isabino) of thirty-six metres (118 feet) in circumference. 
This ancient tree is consequently larger than the cypress of 
Atlixco, of which we have already spoken, the dragonnier 
of the Canary Islands and all the baobabs of Africa." 

This tree is as worthy of admiring study as any of the 
ruins which are so thick in Oaxaca, the site of hundreds of 
forgotten cities of the past. It is a Mexican antiquity 
which, instead of crumbling gradually to dust, adds yearly 
to its vast girth and stature, and promises to live and grow 
for centuries to come. In ages past it was, and it still is, an 
object of wonder and A r eneration to the Indians. It is said 
that Cortes camped under it in his historic march to Hon- 
duras. If he did, however, he left, to his credit, be it said, 
no commemorative tablet a la Humboldt. In brief, the 
Tule cypress is possibly the oldest and stoutest tree in the 
world. 

I have seen the Mariposa group of big trees in California, 
which are world famous for their girth, but no one of the 
redwoods begins to be as impressive a spectacle as the Mexi- 
can ahuehuete. The latter is not of a height to correspond 
to the area covered by its trunk and spreading branches, 
and is much shorter than a number of the redwoods, both 
of the Mariposa and Calaveras groups. The cypress is not, 
however, of a squatty appearance. The smooth-surfaced 
trunk of the redwood shoots upward in a graceful column 
sometimes two hundred feet before it is broken by branches, 
and no great expanse of foliage adds to its spectacular ef- 
fectiveness. The Tule cypress, on the contrary, sends up its 
vast, gnarled, deeply indented, venerable-looking trunk only 
about twenty feet before it shoots out branches in every di- 
rection, as thick as large trees at the junction with * the 
trunk, and stretching between fifty and a hundred feet from 



87 

it. The diameter of the circle of the ground space under- 
neath the tree's spreading branches is 141 feet. From the 
point where the foliage begins to the tree top is about 140 
feet. The impressiveness of this vast area of foliage may 
be imagined. 

THE BIGNESS OF THE TULE TREE. 

Successive visitors to the Tule tree who have measured it 
and printed the resulting figures have varied considerably 
in their reports. It has, of course, increased in size every 
year. The absorption of the so-called Humboldt tablet into 
the body of the tree gives an indication of this growth. For 
convenience, I will put in tabular shape some of the succes- 
sive measurements of the Tule cypress, and the correspond- 
ing figures concerning the California redwoods. 

THE TULE TREE. 

Circumference. Height. 

Humboldt (1803) 118 feet. 

Von Tempskv (1853) 135 feet. 

Ober <1883) 146 feet. 160 

(5 ft. from ground.) 
Campbell (recent) 154 ft. 2 in. 

(6 ft. from ground.) 
Katies Expedicion i recent. .66. metres — 216.3 ft. 

CALIFORNIA BIG TREES. 

Circumference. Height. 

fjrizzly Giant (Mariposa) 1)4 (250) 

Highest Mariposa tree — 272 

Keystone State (Calaveras) 45 325 

The Batres measurement asserting a circumference of 
over 200 feet is printed upon the only photograph of the 
(ree which now seems to be sold in the Mexican shops. It 
probably gives the girth of the trunk close to the ground, 
where the great ribs of the tree swell outward as they enter 
the soil, and it is difficult to decide with precision where the 
beribbed trunk ends and the roots begin. Other variations 
of measurement are probably due largely to the different 
degrees in which the measurers followed the irregularities 
in the deeply indented trunk. 



88 



AN OAXACAN CATASTROPHE. 



While we were still trying to grasp an adequate concep- 
tion of the magnitude of the Big Tree, and were puzzling 
ourselves as to whether it was twins, triplets, quadruplets 
or a single individual, the Batres equipage crawled slowly 
into view, displaying a broken back, spliced with splints 
and rope. "It is well, Madame," said Dr. Batres, "that you 
chose the other coach. My own has broken in two and 
tumbled me upon the ground." It often happened that Dr. 
Batres, who was educated in Paris, spoke such un-American 
French that we had difficulty in comprehending him, but 
the meaning of his words on this occasion, supplemented 
as they were by appropriate accompanying gestures, full of 
animation, was on the instant perfectly and painfully evi- 
dent. 

Soon our procession moved again through the streets of 
Tule. Our reception in this Indian village and in others 
through which we passed, as like it as peas in a pod, was 
African, and many of the sights were African also. We 
were greeted at the beginning of the long main street by 
outposts of barking, snarling dogs, whose numbers increased 
and the volume of whose chorus enlarged as we penetrated 
the village. The fences on either side of the street were 
hedges of organ cactus, the gates were cane, sugar cane or 
bamboo. As in a new Western mining camp there is a 
gradual development in man's habitations, beginning with 
the tent, then passing to the chimneyless hut of rough logs 
of uneven lengths, then to the cabin of smoothed, planed 
logs or even lumber, equipped with windows and a chim- 
ney, so there is a similar evolution in Oaxaca's villages. 
The aristocrats live in adobe structures with tiled roofs. 
The plebeians build themselves primitive dwellings of wat- 
tled cane work plastered with clay, windowless, chimney- 
less, thatched either with palmetto or maguey leaves, ac- 
cording to the altitude and temperature of the village. 
There are palms in abundance in tropical Mexico, but on 
the higher levels the maguey takes its place, the general 
utility plant of the Mexican, who eats its sprouts, thatches 
his roof and feeds his fires with its dried leaves, makes pins 
and needles of its thorns, twine, rope and paper from its 
fiber, and pulque (beer) and mescal (whiskey) from its juice. 
With us the maguey is called the century plant, because it 
is supposed, erroneously, to blossom only once in a hundred 
years. In Mexico it may be properly called the century 
plant, because it has at least a hundred uses. 



89 



AN AMERICAN TIMBUCTOO. 

It is not surprising- that in habitations and living occu- 
pants of the streets, from snarling dogs and patient donkeys 
to dark-skinned, lightly-clad natives, there should be sug- 
gestions of Africa. These villages are in the same latitude 
with Senegal in Senegambia, with Timbuctoo, and with the 
sixth cataract of the Nile, with Bombay in India and Ma- 
nila in the Philippine Islands. 

The most interesting Indian village which we visited lies 
between Tule and Tlacolula on a by-way diverging from the 
main road, and boasts the euphonious name of Tlacoxa- 
huaja. In the old times all of fruitful Oaxaca was densely 
populated with a series of magnificent cities, now dead and 
buried and crumbled into dust. 

"And millions in these solitudes, 
Since first the flight of years began, 
Have laid them down to their last sleep." 

The natives of the present, living over the remains of the 
myriads of the past, are constantly unearthing antiquities, 
treasures of the buried dead, which they sell cheaply to semi- 
occasional visitors. Dr. Batres and the English engineer 
were ardent pursuers of bargains in these antiquities. And 
thereby hangs a tale, the Tlacoxahuaja episode. As we 
drove slowly up the main street of the Zapotec towm, ac- 
companied by our customary reception committee of yelping 
curs, there issued, it seemed, from every other house Tla- 
coxahuajans of both sexes and all ages, offering antiquities 
for our inspection, heads of jade, idols of stone or clay of 
varying sizes and degrees of dilapidation, but of unvarying 
ugliness. Finally Dr. Batres' broken-backed wagon, w r hich 
led the way. stopped, the procession came to a halt and Dr. 
Batres disappeared in one of Tlacoxahuaja's lanes. He was 
on the track of a rare treasure, his driver said, and would 
return quickly. Meanwhile the crowd of curio-venders took 
possession of us. 

When half an hour had passed without any indication of 
Dr. Batres' return the English engineer, evidently yearning 
to discover behind the cactus hedges and in the thatched 
huts some priceless antiquity, recently unearthed, could no 
longer restrain his uneasiness concerning the missing con- 
servator of ancient monuments, and though he himself 
could speak not a word of Zapotec valiantly volunteered to 



90 

go upon a tour of discovery in search of the lost one with 
the additional idea, possibly, of conserving some ancient 
monuments himself. So he disappeared also. Within an- 
other half hour the peddlers of antiquities discovered that 
we green hands made no purchases except upon the advice 
of our missing experts, so they arranged themselves in the 
shadow of the hedge and patiently waited, with the excep- 
tion of one hideous hag, who became insulted at our lack of 
appreciation of her offered idol, anathematized us vigorous- 
ly and hid herself in her hut. 

SCENES IN AN INDIAN VILLAGE. 

In another half hour I had photographed numerous Tla- 
coxahuajans and their dwellings, the patient group of curio 
vendors, the shifting scenes on the village street. Here, in 
front of a low hut, of which a section of the thatched roof 
was broken away, so that its foundation framework of light 
poles protruded skeleton-like, was a group of Zapotecs at 
home, cunning moon-faced babies on the backs of only 
slightly-bigger brother and sister, full-grown men dressed in 
white cotton, with sombrero, serape and sandals. Here a 
half-naked Zapotec with fine muscular development of the 
arms and chest labors along the main street under an im- 
mense, filled, cylindrical basket, much larger and heavier 
than himself. Here conies riding by a Zapotec maiden, 
mounted on a donkey, with basket panniers on either side, 
the damsel's eyes shaded from the sun by her reboso con- 
verted into an impromptu hood. While we were curiously 
inspecting a procession of horsemen, followed by numerous 
heavily laden mules, which we were told, were bull fighters 
and their paraphernalia on their way to perform in a neigh- 
boring village, Dr. Batres appeared, eager to take his de- 
parture, and impatient and disturbed at the absence of the 
English engineer, who was supposed to be searching for 
him. After another period of shouting and waiting and 
fretting, the Englishman came in sight, and as he ap- 
proached we saw that his face was radiant with the joyful 
enthusiasm of one who has unearthed a long-lost treasure. 
As to whether he was in fact laden with one or more pre- 
cious antiquities deponent sayeth not. Presumably not, 
for it is unlawful to remove such finds from Mexico, and I 
do not believe that the Mexican National Museum was in 
any respect richer for our trip. 

As darkness gathered at the end of our first day's expe- 
rience we drove into Tlacolula. where we were to spend the 
night. 



MITLA'S RUINS. 



Palaces, Pyramids, and Tombs of Zapotec Kings— An 
Ancient City of the New World— Mosaics, Columns, 
and Fresco Paintings of a Vanished Civilization— 
The Hidden Treasure City. 

[Editorial correspondence of the Evening Star, February 8, 1896.] 

We were awakened at a very early hour in the morning 
by the shrill yoiees of the choir boys in Tlacolula's Church, 
close to the window of our improvised hotel in this Mexican 
Indian village. The church to which our attention was thus 
attracted proved interesting, not merely from its youthful 
choristers, but from its magnificent display of antique solid 
silver, which in some miraculous way escaped confiscation 
in the struggles between church and state during the reform 
era. And we captured the best of our typical Zapotecs 
while he was cleaning some of this very silver in front of 
the old church building. 

A MAN-HUNT. 

I have mentioned that Dr. Batres was collecting Zapotec 
types to exhibit in connection with his proposed address 
before the Congress of Americanistas, then soon to meet in 
the City of Mexico. Dr. Batres had very definite and fixed 
ideas of the facial and physical characteristics of the differ- 
ent Indian tribes of early Mexico. Indeed, he had unalter- 
ably formulated in lectures and publications his theories on 
this subject. He had previously caught and confined in his 
house in Mexico some Tarascans who looked as Tarascans 
ought; Aztecs and Toltecs were readily to be captured in 
the valley of Mexico or thereabouts; but his hunting ground 
of genuine Zapotecs was limited to the section of country 
which we were then visiting. A hooked nose projecting like 
a beak from a long face was the most conspicuous charac- 
teristic of Dr. Batres' typical Zapotec. So our party made 
a specialty of carefully inspecting Indian noses on every 
occasion. The Jefe Politico or Mayor of Tlacolula, a keen. 



92 

soldierly-looking old man, to whom Dr. Batres had letters 
from the Governor of Oaxaca, entered heartily into the spirit 
of the man-hunt. He brought up group after group of Za- 
potecs, typical or otherwise, to shake hands with our party 
in turn and to submit their noses to a competitive examina- 
tion. Nearly all of them found difficulty in believing that 
anybody would be so foolishly extravagant as to pay their 
expenses to Mexico, enabling them to enjoy the luxury of 
being in that city during the world-famous coronation of 
the Virgin of Guadalupe, merely out of interest in the shape 
of their noses, and the most effective work of the Jefe Po- 
litico consisted in restoring confidence in the rectitude of 
Dr. Batres' intentions concerning them. As a rule they 
were as suspicious and timorous as a Washington colored 
boy would be if offered his expenses and something in ad- 
dition to go over and exhibit himself at night to a Baltimore 
medical college. The group of young men, however, who 
were polishing up silver in front of Tlacolula Church showed 
no uneasiness whatsoever. They were eager to avail them- 
selves of so good an opportunity to behold the coronation 
of the Virgin, and they vigorously impressed upon the party 
Of inspection the merits of their respective noses. One se- 
lected from this group became the leader of the three typical 
Zapotecs finally chosen, and at intervals on our journey from 
Mitla until we saw them for the last time in Dr. Batres* 
house in Mexico, these Indian exhibits would file solemnly 
into our presence and shake hands ceremoniously all around, 
amusingly suggestive of the delegation from Cambodia, 
which haunted Wang in the comic opera. 

mitla's famous ruins. 

When our procession left Tlacolula for Mitla, eight miles 
away, the Jefe Politico accompanied us, and in our visits 
to the ruins served as our guide, companion and familiar 
friend. At Mitla we found another hacienda converted into 
a hotel, where we were comfortably accommodated. 

Mitla is one of the famous ancient cities of Central Amer- 
ica, and as a new world ruin it is in the same class in point 
of interest with Palenque in Chiapas, Uxmal in Yucatan, 
and Copan in Honduras. Where a vast city once stretched 
its streets and raised its temple-crowned pyramids and 
wonderful palaces now all is solitude and desolation save 
for a miserable Indian village of thatched huts, and the fast 
disappearing remnants of three or four palaces and a few 



93 

of the countless pyramids of ages ago. Unlike the other 
notable ruins of Mexico which are overgrown and hidden 
by luxuriant tropical vegetation, Mitla is exposed to the 
sun and wind of a desolate barren sandy valley, in its site 
resembling more the Egyptian ruins along the Nile than 
its new world neighbors. Whether Mitla was built by Za- 
potecs or Toltecs or a race of men preceding both, whether 
it is 700, 1,700 or 2,700 years old, whether the ancestors of 
its builders came from China or Cambodia or Egypt or West 
Africa, or were of American origin are questions over which 
the archaeologists may be permitted to quarrel undisturbed. 
No inscriptions are found here to give a clue, and the hiero- 
glyphics discovered in the other Central American cities 
have never yet been deciphered, but await still their Rosetta 
Stone. 

Leaving the cool court yard of our adobe "hotel," with 
its orange and pomegranate trees and it surprisingly harmo- 
nious monkey and parrots, we soon reached the outskirts of 
the modern Indian village, and began to run the gauntlet 
of antiquity vendors, composed largely of girls and boys 
with ugly idols, masks and beads, collected from palaces 
and tombs. Some of the children had the sweet and plain- 
tive voices of the water girls of the Nile. The babies were 
more attractive than the Egyptian, since their teeth were 
just as white, while their eyes were not sore and fly-infested 
like those of the race upon the Nile, which is cursed with 
ophthalmia as with an epidemic. After threading our way 
among numerous cane-built huts and spreading consterna- 
tion among the Zapotec children of tender years we came 
to the first of ancient Mitla's exhibits, a recently excavated 
tomb of plain stone, without ornamentation or inscription. 
Near by numerous pyramidal mounds were scattered among 
the houses. We examined one which had been cut entirely 
through, and thoroughly excavated. Like many other of 
the Mexican pyramids, these mounds, through the action 
of the elements, have assumed the appearance of natural 
conical hills, and it is only when one is pierced by the inves- 
tigator that its artificial character is made plain. These 
small mounds are pronounced by Dr. Batres to be in ma- 
terial and method of construction miniatures of the great 
pyramids of the sun and moon at Teotihuacan, twenty-seven 
miles from the city of Mexico. The latter pyramids have 
interiors of clay and volcanic pebbles, incrusted on the sur- 
face with a light porous stone, over which there was origin- 
ally a coating of white stucco, such as was used for dwell- 



94 

ings. The largest of Mitla's pyramids is one which stands 
to the west of the main palace group, which we soon ap- 
proach. It bears upon its summit a small chapel, the in- 
variable Spanish substitute for the Indian temple which 
surmounted the pyramid in this part of the world. 

MEXICAN AND EGYPTIAN PYRAMIDS. 

All of these structures in Mexico bear a strong family re- 
semblance, whether they are tiny, as at Mitla, or monstrous, 
covering forty-five acres, as at Oholula, near Puebla. In 
every case they are the foundations of a temple or palace; 
whereas the Egyptian pyramid is a tomb and nothing else. 
The latter rose to an apex; the former was truncated and 
bore a structure upon it which was accessible by a stairway. 
Height was the conspicuous feature of the Egyptian pyra- 
mid; area covered was that of the Mexican pyramid. The 
former was, as a rule, made of stone; the latter generally of 
sun-dried bricks. But there are brick pyramids in the old 
world, including one near Sakhara, Egypt. Humboldt, who 
did see the pyramid of Cholula, whatever may have been the 
case in respect to Tule tree and the ruins of Mitla, compares 
it with the other great pyramids of the world. The dimen- 
sions are given in French feet, each of which equals 1.066 
English feet. 

STONE PYRAMIDS. 

Length 
Height. of base. 

Cheops, Egypt 448 728 

Cephren, Egypt 898 655 

Mycerinus, Egypt 162 280 

BRICK PYRAMIDS. 

Length 
Height. of base. 

Sakhara, Egypt 150 210 

Teotihuacan, Mexico 171 645 

Cholula, Mexico 172 1,355 

In Cholula pyramid the length of the base is to the per- 
pendicular height as 8 to 1, while in the stone pyramids of 
(Ihizeh the corresponding proportion is 8 to 5. The former 
was to be climbed to a surmounting structure like an artifi- 
cial capitol hill, hence its grades were rendered easy by cov- 



95 

ering an immense area with a comparatively low mound. 
The latter was no more to be scaled than the exterior of any 
other monumental shaft, and it was pushed high in the air 
regardless of the steepness of grade. Cholula pyramid is 
consequently more than twice as large at the base as Cheops, 
the biggest of the Grhizeh pyramids, while it is considerably 
less than half as high as Cheops, and very little higher than 
Mycerinus, the smallest of the Ghizeh group. 

A short distance to the east from the chapel-crowned pyra- 
mid of Mitla we came upon the best preserved of the ruins, 
the main or royal palace. Here many years ago four struc- 
tures, built on oblong mounds of stone and earth about six 
feet high, faced a central court. The north and south build- 
ings were about 130 feet long; the east and west mounds 
120 feet. Only the northern structure, the one whose south 
front faces the court, is reasonably well preserved. Frag- 
ments of the east buildings are standing, traces of that on 
the west are visible, but nothing whatsoever remains of the 
south structure. The facing of the front wall of the north 
building, containing the three entrances to the palace, 
is of large stone blocks of different forms and 
sizes, so arranged, without the use of mortar, that the 
surface is broken into panels of varying dimensions, filled 
with a so-called mosaic of small blocks of stone, so set with 
relation to one another as to form a great variety of pat- 
terns, twenty-two different figures having been counted on 
this single wall. In ordinary mosaic tiny pieces of 
glass, marble or other material are cemented on 
stucco in various designs. Here the design, which is always 
rectangular or diagonal in character, is formed by the pro- 
jecting heads of oblong-shaped pieces of soft sandstone, cut 
with the greatest accuracy and nicety, so as to fit for their 
whole length close together. The lintels of the doorways 
are immense blocks of stone, two of them being over nine- 
teen feet long. The wall is about eighteen feet high and 
130 feet long. The three doorways give entrance to what 
mny be called 

THE HALL OF COLUMNS, 

a room extending in length the full 130 feet of the palace's 
width and about 66 feet wide. In a row in the center of the 
hall stand six stone columns, about fourteen feet high, each 
cut from a single block. Humboldt says of them: 
"What distinguishes the ruins of Mitla from all 



90 

the other ruins of Mexican architecture is six por- 
phyry columns, which are placed in the midst of a vast hall 
and support the ceiling. These columns, almost the only 
ones found in the new continent, bear strong marks of the 
infancy of the art. They have neither base nor capitals. A 
simple contraction of the upper part is only to be remarked.'' 
John L. Stephens, the American who did so much to enter- 
tain and enlighten the world in respect to the buried cities 
of Central America, did not visit Mitla, and generalizing 
from what he had seen and failed to see in the other ruins he 
concludes that the Mexican architecture could not have been 
derived from the Egyptian because among many reasons 
columns are absent from the new continent. He says : 

"Again: Columns are a distinguishing feature of Egyptian 
architecture. There is not a temple on the Nile without 
them; and the reader will bear in mind that among the whole 
of these ruins not one column has been found. If this ar- 
chitecture had been derived from the Egyptian so striking 
and important a feature would never have been thrown 
aside.'- But this reasoning fails, for there are columns in 
Mitla, though they are contemptibly insignificant in size 
compared, let us say, with the stupendous columns at Kar- 
nak. Adjoining the Mitla Hall of Columns is a wing, con- 
stituting the remainder of the palace, 61 feet square. It has 
a central court and four apartments, and is ornamented 
throughout with mosaic work of the kind described as seen 
on the facade. 

MITLA MOSAICS. 

The mosaics resemble the arabesque designs, and are pei- 
haps the most striking peculiarity of Mitla. There is noth- 
ing like them in any other of the ancient cities of the new 
world, and a note in Humboldt's New Spain quotes M. Zo- 
ega, "the most profound connoisseur in Egyptian antiqui- 
ties," as making "the curious observation that the Egyp- 
tians have never employed this species of ornament." Du- 
paix, who visited Mitla in 1806, pays tribute to the mosaics 
as follows: "But what is most remarkable, interesting and 
striking in these monuments, and which alone would be suf- 
ficient to give them the first rank among all known orders 
of architecture, is the execution of their mosaic relievos — 
very different from plain mosaic and consequently requiring 
more ingenious combination and greater art and labor. They 
are inlaid on the surface of the wall, and their duration is 



97 

owing to the method of fixing the prepared stones into the 
stone surface, which made their union with it perfect." 

I quote from Dupaix with a great deal of pleasure, because 
Hubert Howe Bancroft, who confesses that he was never 
here himself, and who, in his "Native Races of the Pacific 
States," almost demonstrates that nobody else in his full 
senses was ever here, freely admits that Dupaix visited Mitla, 
yet refrains from intimating that he was impossibly far- 
sighted, short-sighted or color-blind. 

South of the palace which has been described, and close 
at hand, is another similarly constructed in four buildings 
about a central court. Fragments only of the buildings re- 
main. The most interesting feature of this group is an un- 
derground gallery in the shape of a cross. The walls 
are panels of mosaic work and show traces of red paint. At 
the entrance is a circular supporting pillar with a square 
base, called by the Indians, "the pillar of death," in the be- 
lief that whoever embraces it must die shortly — or some 
time. The Indians also take a deep additional interest in 
the subterranean gallery, because it is thought to lead to 
buried treasure. 

FRAGMENTS OF FRESCO PAINTINGS. 

To the north of the main palace, and farther removed from 
it than the palace with the subterranean passage, is a third 
group of buildings, three in number, 284 feet long and 108 
feet wide. A church has been built adjacent to or trenching 
upon the site of the palace, and the central of the ruined 
structures now serves, being repaired, as the curate's house. 
The portion of this ruin used as a stable is notable as con- 
taining some fragments of rude red and black paintings, 
representing processions, and viewed as hieroglyphical and 
ecclesiastical and as indicating that this palace was devoted 
to the uses of the priests, while the first palace was the re- 
tiring place in seasons of sadness of the king, built above 
royal tombs. The most elaborate reproductions and expla- 
nations of these extremely unsatisfactory fragments of paint- 
ings are those just published by Dr. Edward Seler, who is 
at the head of the American department of the Ethnologic 
Museum of Berlin. In a visit in 1888 he discovered a series 
of these paintings in the curate's stable, and after seven 
years of deliberation the discoverer has made up his mind 
what the pictures mean, and has given his views, handsome- 



98 

ly illustrated, to the public. Dr. Seler comes to the conclu- 
sion that the story told in the unconnected fragments is 
nothing else than that of Quetzalcoatl, the culture hero of 
the Toltecs, as Osiris was the culture hero of the Nile. As 
the story of the whitewashed, rain-washed fragments grows 
more illegible every year, it is unlikely that anybody will 
ever be able to contradict Dr. Seler as to the meaning which 
he has assigned to them from his inspection seven years ago. 

The palaces of the Zapotec city do not now make very 
imposing ruins. They are not of sufficient height to be im- 
pressive in comparison with the towering temples, pyramids, 
obelisks and columned halls of Egypt. The Mitla palaces, 
the Cholula pyramid and the Tule tree are all wonderful in 
the surface area covered by them respectively, and com- 
paratively insignificant in height. The mosaics, primitive 
columns and fresco paintings, if the latter are ancient, are 
the unique attractions of Mitla. There are here no idols 
and sculptured surfaces carved in figures or hieroglyphics 
like those of which Charnay took casts in other ancient cities 
of Mexico. In the whole Charnay collection as exhibited in 
the Smithsonian and National Museum there is not a cast 
from Mitla. It is a peculiarity of these New World ruins 
that it is the palaces which are built of stone, and which still 
exhibit vast remains for inspection, while in Egypt the pal- 
ace s were of perishable material, and have long ago disap- 
peared, colossal temples supplying the existing ruins. Speak- 
ing of the Mitla palaces standing in his time, Dupaix says 
of them that they "were erected with lavish magnificence. 
* * * They combine the solidity of the works of Egypt 
with the elegance of those of Greece." Their beauty, says 
Charnay, can be matched only by the monuments of Greece 
and Rome in their best days. Humboldt comments upon 
"their symmetry and the elegance of their ornaments." 

As the zoologist discovering a single bone can in an in- 
stant in his mind's eye complete the skeleton, clothe it with 
flesh and animate it with the life of ages ago, so the archae- 
ologist gazing on broken, crumbling ruins can reconstruct 
the beautiful and imposing architecture of the ancient city, 
and revel in the prospect which he beholds. The strain upon 
the imagination of the tyro in archaeology is sometimes se- 
vere when he is called upon to follow, without resting every 
footstep of the expert in these excursions. But even the 
most unimaginative will be impelled by what he sees here 
to repeople in thought this barren, desolate valley, to send 
the Mitla streets in every direction to far distant termini, 



on one side even to the fortress on a commanding eminence 
which still looks down upon the city's site, to raise here 
and there scores of truncated pyramids, bearing on their 
summits primitive temples, undying fire, and, perhaps, the 
shambles of human sacrifice, and to rebuild in pristine 
beauty and magnificence the royal palaces and tombs that 
furnished the most notable sights of this ancient religious 
center of the Zapotecs. 

ANCIENT CITIES OF THE NEW WORLD. 



A visit here fills one with an irresistible desire to see the 
other ruined cities of the old New World — Palenque, with 
its stucco adornments, carved tablets and hieroglyphics; 
Uxinal, with its magnificent buildings and its sculptured fa- 
cades of wonderful richness, and Copan, with its curiously 
carved colossal idols and its undecipherable hieroglyphics. 
And w T hen the wonders of these and a score of other un- 
earthed cities in this once densely populated region have 
been enjoyed, we may discover in the unexplored wilds of 
Guatemala that silver-walled mysterious city pointed out 
at an inaccessible distance to Stephens, who deposes and 
says: "I conceive it to be not impossible that within this 
secluded region may exist at this day, unknown to w T hite 
men, a living aboriginal city, occupied by relics of the an- 
cient race, who still worship in the temples of their fathers." 
In this gleaming, aboriginal, hitherto inaccessible city will 
be found when discovered the treasure house of the conti- 
nent, in which the Indians secreted their accumulated treas- 
ure to baffle the covetous Spaniard. The discovery of these 
vast deposits of the precious metals may be the final mouth- 
ful needed to glut the world with silver and gold. But 
more important even than the rifling of the American treas- 
ure house w r ould be the gain of treasures of knowledge in 
finding through the language of the hidden city the key to 
unlock the hieroglyphics of Copan, Palenque and Yucatan. 
Among the precious stones to be secured here will be a new 
Rosetta Stone. Let the rush of our explorers be no longer 
to the North Pole or the South Pole or Central Africa, but 
to this rich and fruitful field. 

The annual exodus from the United States into Europe 
will be diverted in the direction of these places, including 
the aboriginal treasure city, just as soon as the extension 
of the Pan-American route carries one within the range of 
convenient access to them. Mexico ought to uncover, pro 



100 

tect and render accessible her buried cities, and as the 
American Egypt she would attract within her borders a 
countless host of tourist visitors annually, bringing thou- 
sands of dollars to the empty purses of the bulk of her popu- 
lation. The Indians at Mitla steal the pieces of mosaic in 
the belief, based upon a tradition, that they will turn to gold. 
Mexico can verify the tradition and coin gold from the mo- 
saics by keeping them in place, vigilantly protecting them 
against vandals, and preserving them in full effectiveness as 
magnets to draw dollars from the great American traveling 
public. 



NIKKO'S GREAT DAY. 



Festival and Procession in Honor of Ieyasu— Old and 
New Japan— Imitative Orientals in Pursuit of the 
Secret of Western Power— Japan Stoops to Conquer 

[Editorial correspondence of the Evening Star, February 5, 1898.] 

The manager of our hotel at Nikko was the personification 
of modern Japan. An irrepressible conflict between the old 
and the new waged ceaselessly within him. As Europe and 
Asia in surging crowds of all nationalities occupy simul- 
taneously or in succession the floating bridge across the 
Golden Horn at Constantinople, so oriental and occidental 
ideas and tendencies in turn or together swept over the mind 
of our Japanese boniface, rudely jostling and crowding one 
another and often producing hopeless confusion. 

Like others of the enterprising and ambitious among his 
people he had deigned to stoop to conquer, not to win love 
after the fashion of the heroine in Goldsmith's comedy, but 
to gain the secret of western power. Japan reverences the 
money-making, cannon-firing abilities of the "foreign devils." 
The Japanese have humbly placed themselves at the feet of 
occidental instructors in order to learn all the mysteries of a 
new and strange civilization, with the confident ambition of 
some day surpassing and discarding every foreign teacher. 
Devotion to no occidental fetich has been neglected. In 
language, dress, education, military methods and even in re- 
ligion there has been painstaking imitation. In the latter 
respect the modern Japanese in repudiating Buddhism and 
other oriental creeds too often falls short of Christianity and 
sticks in an intermediate agnostic stage between the old and 
the new, suggesting, like the half -converted Jew in the wit- 
ticism, the blank page between the Old and the New Testa- 
ments. 

That our hotel boasted a visible, responsible manager at 
all was notable evidence of the progressiveness of the new 
Japan. Yaami's, the famous hostelry at Kioto, was favored 
with no such official. Neither was the vast Imperial Hotel 
at Tokio. In Japanese inns in general, outside of the foreign 
concessions, which have some admirable hotels under Eu- 



102 

ropean or American management, like the Grand at Yoko- 
hama, the bediamonded and omniscient hotel clerk of Amer- 
ica is represented by an irresponsible gypsy-like group 
crouching about a tiny charcoal fire, kindled apparently in 
a hole in the floor, among whom the proprietor sometimes 
skulks incognito, while the stranger within the gates, in 
the absence of his guide, is compelled to confide his griefs 
to brown and plump maidservants, who eke out an ex- 
tremely defective English vocabulary with profound bows 
and pleasing smiles. 

A DUAL LIFE IN JAPAN. 

But here at Nikko was a real, live hotel manager, eager to 
please, bubbling over with enthusiasm and misinformation. 
During the day the oriental section of his brain was inactive 
and the occidental had full sway. Discarding the flowing 
robe of the aristocrat and the loin cloth or the sack and tight- 
fitting drawers of the plebeian of the orient, he appeared in 
ill-fitting European clothes of utilitarian deformity and of 
many colors, like Joseph's coat. His feet, accustomed in- 
doors to the soft tabi — a sock with a separate compartment 
for the big toe — a foot mitten, so to speak — and out-of-doors 
to wooden clogs or straw sandals, were confined and cramped 
in hard, ugly occidental shoes of leather. His head, usually 
bare and protected by a thick black crop of hair, was rend- 
ered as uneasy as that which wears a crown by the unac- 
customed pressure of a stiff derby. Instead of the Japanese 
fan and parasol he wielded a cane. In striking contrast with 
the bare, unheated Japanese house, with its movable screens 
for walls and partitions, with its mat floors, highly polished 
wood and its lack of visible furniture, this manager con- 
ducted a modern hotel, with stove-heated rooms, boasting 
high beds, chairs and tables. As a finishing touch to the de- 
orientalizing process, a brass band was let loose upon the 
guests at dinner time, in which Japanese performers played 
European music and conscientiously blew as hard as they 
could from beginning to end of the musical program. 

At night, behold the manager as an oriental at ease In 
the Japanese annex to the hotel, sitting luxuriously on his 
heels on the floor, arrayed in flowing kimono and smoking 
the tiny pipe which the Japanese affect. During the day 
he has been exposed to the arrogance and the whims of occi- 
dental femininity; at night the oriental woman ministers 
to him as a semi-slave, a being "with never a soul to save," 



103 

who must borrow a soul in the hereafter in order to con- 
tinue her service of her husband, her lord and master, be- 
yond the grave. In this phase of his dual life the manager 
reflects with bitterness upon the despised sex, which, through 
self-assertive representatives of it from beyond the seas, has 
overturned his preconceived ideas of femininity and has dis- 
gusted and alarmed him. To be sure, the process of modern- 
izing the Japanese woman in ideas, in customs and costumes 
had been officially authorized and had begun, but happily 
a reaction had set in and woman was again taught to know 
her place. In his land man preceded woman in everything. 
Married women in the good old time had to shave their eye- 
brows and blacken their teeth. 

The husband w r ears mourning garments for the dead wife 
only thirty days; the wife for the dead husband thirteen 
months. The wife is therefore to the husband as one to 
thirteen. Thus in Japan it takes even more women than 
tailors to make a man. These thoughts comforted his spir- 
its, chafed by the nagging of women from over the sea. It 
is very trying to the oriental to be subjected to feminine ar- 
rogance. He knows that both Confucianism and Buddhism 
have treated her as of an inferior soul-lacking order of crea- 
tion. He recollects the Buddhist popular precept: "Woman 
has no home in the three worlds — past, present and future.'' 
Yet here were women, foreign women, making themselves 
very much at home in the present world, notwithstanding 
the proverb, and clearly indicating a firm determination to 
dominate also in the world to come. 

Across the seas the woman, he has learned, takes prece- 
dence over the man. She goes first everywhere, and the men 
are proud and happy to serve her. But what could one ex- 
pect, our oriental thinks, from foreign devils whose mourn- 
ing color is black instead of white, who remove their head- 
gear instead of their footgear when they wish to be polite, 
who salute by handshakes and disgusting kisses instead of 
the traditional bowings and prostrations, and whose creed 
carries barbarism to its climax in its impious requirement 
that a man shall leave father and mother and cleave to his 
wife. 

A MODERN SUBSTITUTE FOR HARA-KARI. 

But there is a limit to the manager's orientalism. In spite 
of kimono, tabi, hibachi, futon, tobako-bon and other Japan- 
ese surroundings, he is not tempted in the slightest degree 
to commit hara-kiri or suicide after the national method bv 



t 



104 

disembowelment in resentment of the day's insults. But, 
instead, he reserves to himself the occidental right of ex- 
pressing that resentment in vigorous English swear words, 
his own language being entirely deficient in terms of abuse 
and in verbal facilities for the purpose of profanity. He 
thus makes use of the occidental safety valve for the relief 
of the emotions, the absence of which in the case of the Jap- 
anese leaves apparently no resort but suicide. 

On this particular day our Nikko manager soared above 
all his troubles. Complaints glided from his unctuous per- 
sonality like an opponent's grasp from the oiled body of the 
native wrestler, without wrinkling his smooth, inscrutable 
countenance and without subtracting a single beam of the 
joyous enthusiasm that danced in his oblique eyes. The fas- 
tidious gentleman from Philadelphia, who, demanding bread 
from his Japanese waiter at the beginning of his meal, was 
offered not a stone, but toothpicks, found in the manager a 
sympathetic and consoling listener to his tale of woe. So 
did the Englishman who had been advised by the manager 
(the Englishman's own inclinations tending in that direction) 
to make the Lake Chuzenji trip on horseback, and who had 
been soaked to the skin in pitiless rains. So did the stout 
Australian to whom the jinrikisha system of rapid transit 
for the lake trip had been recommended as easiest, and who 
found to his disgust that for half a mile of the way he had 
to leave his jinrikisha and clamber on foot over sharp and 
slippery rocks. So did the American woman who had en- 
dured unresistingly the robberies of the hackman in the 
cities of her native land, from whom a charge of fl.50 per 
hour for carriage hire at home would elicit no remonstrance, 
but who by persistent and fretful faultfinding sorely tried 
the manager's patience because her jinrikisha man for his 
day's labor up and down the steep hills of Nikko had charger! 
her 20 sen, or 10 cents more than the corresponding charge 
for the day over the smooth and level streets of Tokio. But 
the lady crying extortion over a charge of 42 cents for a 
carriage and human horse for the day was soothed as well 
as the others through the tact and diplomacy of the man- 
ager. And to all the complainants, as soon as the symp- 
toms of placation appeared, the manager announced with 
bows and smiles and appropriate gestures his triumph over 
all his rivals, his masterpiece of planning! 

"Ladies (or gentlemen), for the procession of to-day. my 
arrangements, the arrangements for the guests of this hotel, 
are unsurpassed. In the broad avenue opposite the Sorinto 



105 



column, where everything can be seen, a pavilion for the ex- 
clusive use of my guests has been built. There will be claret 
punch for my guests and ice cream and light refreshments. 
Nothing like it for the enjoyment of European and American 
visitors has ever before been known in Nikko." And off the 
manager shot to communicate the glad tidings to the next 
member of the army of the discontented. 



IN HONOR OF IEYASU. 

This, the 3d of June, is Nikko's great day, noted for the 
festival and procession in honor of Ieyasu, the first Toku- 
gawa shogun, who is buried here as to his mortal part and 
deified and worshiped as a god, Toshogu, in the mortuary 
chapel near his tomb. 

Ieyasu is the most famous name in Japanese history. Sol- 
dier, statesman, law-giver of the sixteenth century, he wrest- 
ed temporal pow 7 er from the Mikado's feeble hands, and 
worshiping with the rest of the nation that monarch as di- 
vine, he removed him from degrading contact with mundane 
affairs and confined him in the unapproachable seclusion be- 
fitting a god. So great is Ieyasu that though the dynasty 
which he founded and which reigned for two hundred and 
fifty years has been dethroned as a usurpation by the Mi- 
kado, who finally broke from his gilded prison, Ieyasu 
himself retains his glory arid is worshiped as divine by the 
Emperor himself, the descendant of the very Mikado whose 
temporal power Ieyasu usurped. 

In no other respect did Ieyasu demonstrate his greatness 
more conspicuously than in the selection of a burial place. 
In a valley surrounded by Japan's most picturesque moun- 
tain scenery, in a region held sacred by the earliest tradi- 
tions of the people, on a hillside covered with groves of 
majestic cryptomerias, there has been built in his honor the 
richest architectural structure in all Japan, a marvel of 
carving and of elaborate ornamentation in gold and red 
lacquer. 

The bronze Daibutsu of Kamakura is the grandest of Jap- 
anese monuments, despite its rudimentary and irrelevant 
mustache. The Higashi Hongwanji, the great Buddhist 
temple of Kioto, is impressive from its vastness. But in 
varied and fantastic and beautiful forms and in richness of 
decoration the Nikko temples are unsurpassed. 

On this eventful morning the deified spirits of Ieyasu, 
Hidevoshi and Yoritomo were accustomed to occupy three 



10G 

sacred litters or palanquins and indulge in an excursion to 
a neighboring temple, attended in procession by a consider- 
able section of the population of Nikko in fantastic and re- 
ligious array. 

WAITING FOR THE PARADE. 

While the preparations for the procession were in tedious 
progress the foreign visitors to Nikko strolled through the 
temple grounds and enjoyed the picturesque, animated and 
varied scenes. Men and boys in costume, intending partici- 
pants in the procession, were everywhere. Here a crowd 
of small boys in brocades and embroideries, and of mimic 
soldiers of assorted sizes, with long wooden spears, swords, 
bows with lacquered quivers, brocade helmets with bronze 
ornaments, and in some instances with old and costly coats 
of mail, protecting them to the knees, formed a ring about 
an old man and boy, strolling performers of crude acrobat- 
ics and jugglery. Here an important and dignified little 
Japanese policeman performed with becoming gravity his 
serious functions. He was arrayed in a white duck suit, 
resplendent with brass buttons. His soldier cap of blue 
was ornamented with gold braid. On his hands were white 
cotton gloves, and he bore a sword instead of a club. On 
his nose was perched (one of the few large things in Japan> 
a pair of spectacles with immense frames, of the kind asso- 
ciated by illustrators with Chinese sages. Our wanderings 
take us with the crowd of spectators, old and young, past 
many booths where refreshments are sold, especially the 
Japanese counterparts of the snow ball and hokey-pokey; 
past other rude stands, where young Japan buys gaily- 
colored paper birds that fly through the air for a consider- 
able distance, when properly manipulated and encouraged, 
and finally we stumble across the frail wooden structure 
with bamboo curtains for walls which furnishes a resting 
place and shelter from the sun to spectators of the parade 
among the guests of the Nikko hotel. 

The booming of the great bell in the Buddhist temple just 
opposite the pavilion proclaims that the hour when the pro 
cession is due has arrived. But no one expects it. The 
custom of delay, which finds characteristic expression in the 
Spanish "manana" or tomorrow, is as powerful in Ja- 
pan as in Spain or Mexico. One is told that in- 
vitations to native dinners often specify a time an hour be- 
fore the guest's attendance is really desired and expected. 



107 

While we wait, our attention is again attracted to the crowd 
of spectators, a source of unfailing interest. Here three 
small boys in fancy dress, with feather headgear, perform 
feats of tumbling, and collect small coins from the spectators 
for their achievements. A priest hurries by with a black 
head-dress, a white under garment and a changeable green 
silk robe of chameleon capacity. The footgear of the crowd 
includes the tabi alone, the tabi with straw sandals, the 
tabi with wooden clogs, and European or American shoes. 
For headwear most of the Japanese use nothing save thick 
hair and a paper umbrella. A few heads display protecting 
handkerchiefs. Some of the priests wear curiously-shaped 
black caps, close-fitting, with a single black streamer rising 
from each and curving over almost to the back of the neck. 
Men credited with being temple attendants wear what re- 
semble black fools' caps. A baby here and there catches 
the eye with a gorgeously-colored knitted turban. The 
elaborately-dressed hair of some of the women is decorated 
with balls and flowers of colored sik, with pendant tassels. 
Here a coolie displays a large bowl-shaped or mushroom- 
shaped hat woven of straw and covered with cotton or left 
uncovered. The most striking and incongruous head-dress 
is a derby hat, perched stiffly on the head of one in Japanese 
costume. The Japanese full dress festival suit for men, of 
which many are visible, is gray-blue or blue-gray, with white 
crests in each lapel and on the middle of the back. The wo- 
m^n's favorite costume for the occasion is a soft blue or gray 
kimono, with touches of red, and a tasteful brocade obi or 
sash. Young girls alone are privileged to wear gay, bright 
colors. Peculiarities of children's attire are colored aprons, 
adding to the brilliant effects of the ever-changing kaleido- 
scopic aspect of the passing crowd. 

UMBRELLAS AND KODAKS. 

Foreign ribbed umbrellas are strongly and strangely in 
evidence. The Japanese have learned to prefer them ex- 
cept as a protection against rain, for which purpose they 
think that the wide-spreading oiled paper umbrella of their 
own country is more effective. 

Another foreign, yet interesting element of the scene, is 
the kodakist, with eager, curious, crafty look, inveigling 
Japanese children and adults into favorable lights and posi- 
tions for snap-shots, and lavishly expending miles of film 
upon an endless procession of fascinating photographic sub- 



108 

jects. The kodakist has been warned away from Japan by 
the bugbears of the Japanese duty on cameras and of the 
disastrous effect upon the film of the moist atmosphere, 
which has also been credited with supplying insufficient light 
for instantaneous exposures. But if the kodakist who has 
not progressed beyond the snap-shot stage leaves his kodak 
at home when he visits Japan he will always regret doing so. 
Thousands of instantaneous exposures have been success- 
fully taken in Japan, well developed and printed by Japan- 
ese photographers and marvelously colored — all for a price 
less than that charged for simple developing in the United 
States. 

A diversion for the spectators is now produced by a crowd 
of men dressed in white cotton, who rush rapidly up the 
street dragging a tree after them, and who scatter its leaves, 
twigs and branches. In watching their forms disappear up 
the broad avenue one is impressed with the magnificent 
frame- work surrounding the street scene, especially with the 
iine trees through which glimpses are caught of a mortuary 
chapel, or a temple or pagoda, or a curiously-shaped monu- 
ment, or a stone stairway leading to some great building. 
And upon every wall and bank a cluster of Japanese find a. 
perch, developing fine color effects through a combination 
of the red, yellow and blue of the kimonos with gray and 
moss-green walls and the background of foliage. 

GENIAL JAPANESE CROWDS. 

The short, brown men, women and children who surge to 
and fro in front of the pavilion are as interesting as their 
costumes and as their scenic surroundings. A Japanese 
crowd, polite, smiling, considerate, clean as to the body 
from daily hot baths, whatever the condition of the clothing, 
lacks the ill odors and rowdyism of other crowds and sur- 
rounds itself, comparatively speaking, with an atmosphere 
of sweetness, courtesy and urbanity. When, in April, thou- 
sands upon thousands of the people of Tokio throng in 
boats, in jinrikishas or on foot to view the pink clouds of 
cherry blossoms that line for miles the avenue of Mukojima 
on the river bank in the suburbs, there is every excuse for 
disorder that an uproariously jolly crowd of excursionists 
can find. There is sake drinking and there is much un- 
avoidable crowding and jostling. Occasionally the women 
and children and curious foreigners who are enjoying the 
scene press closer to the refreshment- booths that skirt the 



109 

avenue, in order to permit some hilarious picnickers with 
painted faces and grotesque costumes to cut a wider swath 
through the crowd than is permitted to those who are not 
thoroughly exhilarated with the spirit of the occasion and 
with the Japanese intoxicant, but there is only the faintest 
reflection of the belligerent rudeness and the omnipresent 
"drunk and disorderly" nuisance that characterize the occi- 
dental and many oriental crowds. 

When thousands gather in some service before the shrine 
blazing with gold and lacquer in the Higashi Hongwanji at 
Kioto, the largest temple in the empire, the same courteous 
consideration for others is shown. While shaven priests 
in rich vestments burn incense, equally shaven widowers, 
announcing by their hairless heads their determination not to 
marry again, and other bald, old men, squat with the crowd 
on the temple floor side by side with the ancient women 
who wear "horn-hiders" to conceal the evidences of Satan 
which old Japan attributes to the sex, and add their indi- 
vidual contributions to the sea of heads with spreads, wave 
on wave, in every direction. The small coins which the 
faithful throw on the temple floor to be gathered up after 
the service by the priests (and bushels are thus collected 
after every service) are tossed indiscriminately and unhesi- 
tatingly into the crowd, and no attention whatsoever is paid 
by the worshipers to the impact of the coins. A bald head 
hit unintentionally may wince, but that is all. The coin 
drops unheeded to the floor. A similar habit of contribution 
in our rude and barbarous western land would make the 
bald heads shining marks and targets for the youthful and 
irreverent, and the bald heads themselves, lacking oriental 
patience and fortitude, yea, though deacons of the strictest 
sect, would arise from their devotions in ungodly passion 
to eject with violence the offenders. Courtesy covers a 
multitude of peccadilloes. The traveler is swindled right 
and left in every section of the globe, but Japanese cheating 
is so pervaded with politeness and consideration, with bows 
and smiles, and complimentary hissing intakes of the breath, 
that the coarser swindling of other lands shocks by contrast. 
Whether in business or pleasure, whether cheating or pic- 
nicking, whether viewed individually or collectively, the Jap- 
anese as a rule is a kindly, genial being with whom it is a 
pleasure to come into contact. 

While we have been studying the crowd the procession 
has been forming. 



110 



TOMB AND SHRINE OF IEYASU. 

Farthest up the mountain side, where the trees are green- 
est and the little mountain streams gurgle sweetest, and 
save for nature's sounds the profoundest hush pervades the 
scene, lies the tomb of Ieyasu, of light-colored bronze, grand- 
ly impressive in its perfect simplicity. 

From the stone table in front of the tomb, holding a bronze 
stork candlestick and incense burner and a vase containing 
artificial lotus flowers, the tomb's only accessory embellish- 
ments, the devotee descends by a long stone and moss-grown 
stairway to the shrine of Ieyasu, to which most of the other 
structures, scattered lower in successive terraces on the 
hillside, are subsidiary, serving either as approaches or for 
other uses in connection with the worship of Ieyasu as a 
god. In striking contrast with the stern simplicity of the 
dead man's tomb is the rich and elaborate decoration of the 
shrine of the never-dying god and of the gates and other 
approaches to it. Nowhere else in the world is there a more 
notable display of minute wood carving, of delicate coloring, 
of lacquer and inlaid work. 

Near to the innermost gate which leads to the main shrine 
the devotee descending from the tomb would join the proces- 
sion of June 3, for here stands the building called Mikoshido, 
which contains the palanquins or shrines or floats that are 
borne in this procession when the deified spirits of Ieyasu, 
Hideyoshi and Yoritomo occupy them, and so heavy are they 
with the weight of metal and wood and departed greatness 
that seventy-five men are required to carry them. N. Ban, 
an ambitious Japanese, who has courageously written an 
English guide to Nikko, and who, like some others of his 
countrymen who have essayed similar works for other parts 
of Japan, is a hard taskmaster for his English words, com- 
pelling them often to do double or triple duty by serving 
with new meanings in unaccustomed connections, gives a 
somewhat different account of this structure. He says that 
on the left "is the building in which the sacred cars of the 
three original gongen of Nikko are placed during the cere- 
bration (sic) of festivals." 

DESCENDING THE HILLSIDE AT NIKKO. 

Starting from this point, the sacred palanquins and the 
accompanying procession descend the hillside to the open 
court of a temple almost on the level of the river and the 



11 L 

sacred bridge. This course carries them first through the 
exquisitely beautiful gate called Yomei-mon, with its white 
carved columns, thence down a broad flight of steps and past 
the bell tower and the perforated so-called "moth-eaten" 
bell on the left and the drum tower and the so-called Corean 
bronze lantern on the right. Here the stairway of the Leap- 
ing Lions is reached, and, having descended these, the pro- 
cession passes the decorated structure which contains the 
Buddhist scriptures in a red lacquered revolving book case, 
and the holy water cistern, a granite monolith. Then it 
marches under a bronze torii, the curious archway of two 
upright and two horizontal beams which forms the charac- 
teristic approach to every Shinto temple. Next it comes 
to the stable of the "sacred white pony" (which is no longer 
white) and the treasure buildings opposite. 

On the sacred stable one may note the famous carving of 
the monkeys severally represented as closing the ears and 
mouth and shading the eyes, in respect to which the facile 
pen of N. Ban has written: "They are pumingly (sic), called 
first mizaru (don't see any wrong); second, kikazaru (don't 
hear any wrong); third, iwazaru (don't talk any wrong)." On 
the treasure house, opposite the stable, is the curious painted 
carving of elephants by the famous left-handed artist, Hi- 
dari Jingoro, concerning which N. Ban, with easy control 
of English, remarks: "It will be noticed that the joints of 
the hind legs are represented as bent in the weary direc- 
tion." The procession's course now carries it under Nio-mon, 
or gate of the two kings, with its carvings of lions, unicorns, 
tigers, elephants and certain concededly fabulous 
beasts, though all of the carved animals above enu- 
merated are in reality fabulous, since they resemble 
nothing in nature, Japan at the time of their crea- 
tion by the carver possessing none of them alive to serve as 
models. The procession sweeps down the broad stairway 
which rises to the Nio-mon, passes the shoe-removing station 
at its foot, a wooden structure where every one must lay 
aside his shoes before proceeding through the gate of the 
two kings into the sacred inner precincts of the deified Iey- 
asu; passes the five-storied pagoda with its graceful lines 
and attractive red coloring, thence under the great granite 
torii presented by the Prince of Chikuzen. 

As the procession begins to descend the stone stairway 
leading from this torii it becomes visible to the patiently- 
waiting crowd in and about the hotel booth, who have long 
been straining their eyes for this view, having exhaustively 



112 

inspected the entrance to the hall of the Three Buddhas, just 
opposite, and studied every line of the Sorinto or evil-avert- 
ing monument, a black, cylindrical copper column, forty-two 
feet high, which guards this entrance. 

HERE COMES THE PARADE. 

To the spectator from this point looking up the broad ave- 
nue lined with cryptomerias the procession appears as a line 
of blue on one side and a line of pink on the other, followed 
by a confused mass of yellow and white. The blue line re- 
solves itself into a file of men with spears, swords, brocaded 
helmets and vestments of blue or green, the pink line is 
composed of men similarly armed, wearing a reddish over- 
dress. There are perhaps seventy-five in each file. Then 
comes a grotesquely masked figure in a green kimono, bran- 
dishing a spear and followed by two mimic tigers with fierce 
wooden heads decorated with red lacquer, and with gold and 
brocade bodies. Three men, concealed under the brocade, 
furnish legs and motive power to each beast. A band of 
musicians follow 7 with flute and drum, whose colors are 
black and yellow, accompanied by the six sacred Kagura 
dancers with bells and fans, a white handkerchief head- 
dress, a white waist over a brocaded skirt, and a brocade 
obi or sash. These are the damsels of varied ages who, for 
a consideration, offered to the gods and tossed in front of 
them on their platform near the shrine of Ieyasu, go through 
a form of posturing in the god's honor, called the Kagura 
dance, that is as little like a dance as the classic, sacred No 
dance, which is freely admitted by every one who has seen 
it to be no dance at all. Now appear six priests in white 
robes with black headdresses, each mounted on a sacred 
pony. The saddles are in some cases of tiger skin, and all 
are gay in color. Each pony is led by two coolies in white 
and followed by a banner bearer. 

A real, live, modern dog now gives a flavor of the nine- 
teenth century to the procession. 

The soldiers of old are upon us, first a hundred of two- 
sworded men, dressed in blue, carrying on their shoulders 
antique guns (warranted not to fire) in red cloth coverings; 
next perhaps another hundred with long bows and quivers 
of arrows at their backs, a like number with very long 
spears, and then a mailed host of perhaps two hundred, 
wearing two swords, brass and gold-lacquered helmets, 
shoulder pieces and body protection of mail, very impres- 



113 

sive as far down as the knees, but below the mail appear 
legs clad in striped suits of cotton and bare op srraw san- 
daled feet. 

Next conies a group of children in brocade attire with ar- 
tificial flowers in profusion for head dresses, and bearing in 
hand such effigies as that of the fish. 

Then follow footmen in red, wearing grotesque masks; 
footmen in yellow, with tall wooden banners; more horse- 
men and their attendants, perhaps twenty, and empty black 
lacquer litters with brocaded banners and many-colored 
streamers floating from them. Each is carried by four bear- 
ers. The black lacquer pole which rises from the center of 
the litter and from which the banner floats terminates ai 
the top in a bronze ornament, often elaborately worked, and 
in most cases taking- the shape of the Tokugawa crest, that 
of the family of leyasu. 

A smaller litter incloses a great drum, which is borne by 
four men and beaten constantly by a fifth. More footmen 
come into view with swords, tall black caps and blue, white 
and red kimonos, and then appears the full band of the pro 
cession, fifers and drummers in brilliant brocades. 

Many men now march by bearing in their hands repre- 
sentations of hunting birds in wood or plaster. 

Lastly come the three sacred cars, upon which patters 
constantly a shower of cash contributed by spectators, each 
surrounded by a crowd of eager bearers in white robes and 
black caps and each richly decorated and resplendent 
in gold lacquer, while three high priests on sacred ponies 
bring up the rear. 

The procession, after passing the hotel booths descends 
the hill, first by the broad, smooth avenue already described, 
and then by the stony road which leads to the sacred bridge. 
But before the river is reached the procession turns to the left 
in order to descend to the temple, where the palanquins are 
deposited until all the offerings have been made and the 
tedious services have been completed. Then the procession 
reverses its route and starts no the return of the sacred pa 
lanqnins to their accustomed resting place. The return 
trip, though uphill, is made at a much livelier gait than the 
descent, and in comparison with its tortoise movements 
earlier in the day the parade in the afternoon shows much 
of the hustling animation of mourners returning from a 
funeral. 

At this lime it resembled somewhat in gait a religious 
procession of the Inari temple that T saw at Kioto, in which 



114 

the rich palanquins were borne quickly along by a host of 
half-naked men and boys, who interrupted their march only 
to dance and sing and wave their hands, drunk with re- 
ligious enthusiasm and sake. They seemed a jolly, pleasing 
crowd, but just before reaching us they had contested the 
right of way with a trolley car, and the old overcoming the 
new, had overturned the sacrilegious vehicle that interrupted 
the procession of the gods and several of the passengers and 
bvstanders were crushed under the car. 



JAPANESE JINGOISM. 



Boy's Holiday Teaches a Soldier's Love of Country- 
Patriotism Is Religion — Lilliputians in Material 
Things, Giants in National Spirit — The Sign of the 
Carp. 

[Editorial correspondence of the Evening Star, February 12, 1898.] 

A foreign visitor to Xikko in the first week of June, wan- 
dering down the village's single street, lined on both sides 
with little shops where the local specialties of carved wood 
and furs and various curios are sold, notes the evidences of 
one of the most widely-celebrated and most popular of Jap- 
anese anniversaries. 

From many a house or garden tall bamboo poles rise in 
the air from which float immense paper carp, so arranged 
with strings fastened inside the head that their open mouths 
catch the air and they expand and move in a very life-like 
fashion. In some instances a lighter piece of bamboo ter- 
minating in a broom shape is attached to the end of the main 
pole. Or at its top is a ball or fez-shaped object. Banners 
often hang from bamboo arms of the same pole, sometimes 
so large that they dwarf the carp, displaying ferocious fig- 
ures of fighting men, generally in black and white, sometimes 
in colors. Occasionally the pole blossoms out in ten or a 
dozen drooping twigs, long slender sticks issuing on every 
side at the same height, and terminating in small balls, ap- 
parently of metal. 

These are the emblems of boys' day in Japan, when e\ev\ 
family in which a boy has been born during the year pro- 
claims and celebrates the fact. The date of this celebration 
is the fifth day of the fifth month. The old calendar, which 
is still used in the rural districts of Japan, is almost a month 
later than the new calendar, which regulates the time in the 
Japanese cities. 

We had thus the privilege of noting a double celebration 
of the day, in May in Kioto and Osaka, and in Nikko in 
June. But the May observance was comparatively a spirit- 
less affair. There were few of the flying carp in either Kioto 
or Osaka. The rainy weather discouraged to some extent 



116 

the exposure to the elements of paper fish, but the custom 
so far as the carp are concerned seems to be dying out in 
the large cities where modern and occidental ideas pre- 
vail. 

But the swaying fish of many bright colors made a fine 
display in Nikko, hanging sometimes in bunches of half a 
dozen over prolific households, one carp for each boy in the 
family, whether born during the year or earlier. 

Our idea of the carp is of a sluggish fish, a frequenter by 
choice of still and muddy water, or as in China, the contented 
inhabitant of a tub, fed on food-leavings like the family pig 
of other lands. But in Japan the fish is typical of intense 
vitality, and is famous for the power and perseverance 
with which it swims against the current and surmounts 
waterfalls. Thus its paper counterpart symbolizes the 
hopes of the Japanese that their boys may, like the carp, 
stem all adverse currents, leap over the most formidable 
obstacles and live long and prosper. 

NO GLORIFICATION FOR THE GIRL 

The girls also have a holiday, the 3d of March, when the 
feast of dolls is celebrated. The boys' day glorifies the birth 
of a man into the world. The girl enjoys no such glorifica- 
tion. The girl's emblem is like the Japanese woman her- 
self, a doll, a toy, a plaything. The boy's is the symbol of 
all that is powerful and masterful and enterprising. 

In spite of the fact that the Japanese do not hide their 
women in jealous oriental seclusion, and in spite of the fact 
that occidental ideas of costumes and manners have been per- 
mitted to creep in among them, there still lurks under the 
modern varnish the old decayed conviction of the inferiority 
and degradation of women that is taught both in the Bud- 
dhism and the Confucianism which influence the national 
thought. 

The ineradicable oriental view of the differences between 
the sexes from the tenderest age is reflected in the ancient 
Chinese ode, supposed to have been selected by Confucius 
himself, which commemorates the building of a new palace 
for King Swan, 825 B. C: 

"And it shall be whenever sons are born 
These shall be laid on beds to sleep and rest; 
In loose long robes they also shall be dressed, 



117 

And sceptrelets be given them for toys, 
And when they cry what music in the noise! 
Once these shall don the scarlet aprons grand 
And be the kings and princes of the land. 

"And it shall be when daughters are born 
These shall be laid to sleep upon the ground. 
In swaddling bands their bodies shall be bound. 
And pots shall be their playthings. 'Twill belong 
To these to meddle not with right or wrong; 
To mind alone the household drinks and food 
And cause their parents no solicitude." 

The glorification of the boy is complete when the poet 
goes into raptures over the music of his cry. But these very 
raptures show the fallacy of the notion entertained and ex- 
pressed by many travelers that Chinese and Japanese babies 
never cry. If the boy in his comfortable robes on the bed 
and in spite of having a sceptrelet as a plaything cries, even 
though he cries musically, surely the girl in tight swaddling 
band tossed on the ground among the pots will bawl most 
vigorously, careless that no poet finds music in her cry. It 
appears then that the brown babies were in 825 B. C. exer 
cising this inalienable right of universal babydom, and T 
doubt whether they have since surrendered this right. 

JAPANESE BABIES DO CRY. 

Unquestionably the Japanese babies are wonderfully pa- 
tient, well regulated and well behaved. But I heard a baby 
crying lustily on my first day in Japan. I saw a Japanese 
infant despotically ruling his accompanying family of wor- 
shipers, from grandmother down, in a first-class railway 
carriage between Tokio and Kioto, and the boo-hoo was one 
of the most effective weapons of his tyranny. If the Jap- 
anese babies were ever non-crying they have now adopted 
modern notions and customs on the subject in humble imi- 
tation of their parents and have changed all that. The non- 
crying baby, like the scentless flowers and the non-singing 
birds described by veracious travelers, has largely disap- 
peared from Japan, and if present appearances are reliable 
will soon be as extinct as the dodo. 

Altogether, the Japanese babies are most attractive. In 
general make-up with shaven crowns, variegated by hair 
tufts, they look strikingly like the Japanese dolls sold in 



118 

America. Fastened to the back of mother or elder sister 
or brother they bury their noses in the back of the neck of 
their carrier and inspect the world with black and bead-like 
eyes. In Osaka I saw one favored infant who was strapped 
to his carrier's back with his face turned outward, apparent- 
ly a more healthful and reasonable fashion. 

Groups of children, with their bright-colored dresses, their 
oftentimes sweet voices and pleasing manners, are the de- 
light of the foreign visitors, and especially of the amateur 
photographer. 

Here the master of a dancing school leads his pupils, a 
score or more of little girls, out for a vacation romp in 
Shiba Park, in Tokio. The hair of Miss Flora McFlimsey 
was never more elaborately dressed than that of these chil- 
dren, and as to bright colors in attire, in kimono, obi and all 
the rest, Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one 
of these. 

Close at hand are some smaller children, apparently of a 
roving disposition, equipped each with a. charm bag to ward 
off accidents, and a metal bag containing the name and ad- 
dress of the prospective wanderer to the end that he may 
be returned to his home if he is lost. 

Here comes rushing along an avenue of the park a whole 
school of boys out for the breathing spell of a recess. They 
cut up pranks, and laugh, and quarrel, and testify in every 
way to an overflow of animal spirits, just as young America 
would disport himself, except for the latter's disrespect of his 
elders. 

But not all the juvenile conditions are ideal. A great 
many of the heads of children are scabby from eczema, pro- 
duced probably by shaving with dull and dirty razors, to 
which the youngster's head is subjected until the age of five 
or six years is reached. No effort is made to cure this erup- 
tion because, it is explained, a superstition attributes a dis- 
ease-averting and health-giving influence in later life to the 
youthful scabby head. Evidently there is also a popular 
superstition which ascribes some physical ill, present or fu- 
ture, to the blowing of an infant's nose, however much it 
may need this delicate attention. Dainty handkerchiefs of 
children's sizes are made by the thousand in Japan, but 
rhey are used, it would seem, exclusively for export pur- 
poses. 

In addition to the outward display of carp and banners 
floating over many a house there was an indoors exhibit in 
Xikko on the boy's holidav, which was in accord with the 



U9 

symbolism of the carp, as the type of force, power, the over- 
comer of difficulties. Images of generals on horseback and 
soldiers on foot, wrestlers, fighters of every grade and de- 
scription, war flags and banners, toy suits of armor, swords, 
bows and arrows, and the other implements of ancient war, 
which have filled the toy shops for weeks, are now displayed 
by the proud parents of the boy in their home. 

FIRST LESSON IN JINGOISM. 

The most conspicuous of these exhibits are large, set 
pieces, representing warlike subjects such as Hideyoshi on 
his throne and the Empress Jingo and her councilors. 

This mythical empress is a model for the boys in spite 
of her sex and figures conspicuously as the warrior woman 
among the images of the 5th of May, that are used as object 
lessons to teach the young the deeds of heroes, and to pro- 
mote patriotism. 

The Empress Jingo, the conqueror of Corea and the mother 
of Hachiman, the god of war, may be viewed as typical of 
the national patriotic sentiment and of the warlike spirit of 
territorial extension. Under Shintoism, the nominal na- 
tional religion, emperors and empresses, Jingo among them, 
are deified and worshiped. Thus in Japan, at least. Jingo- 
ism equals Shintoism equals Patriotism, and every "Jap" is 
a Jingo. 

In respect to things material and visible Japan is a reali- 
zation of the imaginary land of Lilliput, described by the 
veracious Gulliver. In national spirit and aspiration Japan 
is of Brobdingnagian proportions. 

Every visitor to Japan testifies to the accuracy of the first 
of these statements. The smallness of things Japanese is 
the foreigner's most vivid impression, from his first to his 
last glimpse of the little brown men and women and their 
proportionately tiny appurtenances and belongings. On 
landing at Yokohama he is placed in a jinrikisha or enlarged 
baby carriage, and is hauled to the hotel by a bare-headed 
and bare-legged male nurse, while he instinctively feels for 
his rattle and nursing bottle. Since the baby carriage is 
used by men, the doll's carriage falls to the infants, and in 
the few cases where the Egyptian and Mexican method of 
transporting the baby fastened to the mother's or older sis- 
ter's back is not employed, a vehicle is utilized which might 
have been made from Cinderella's pumpkin without enlarge- 
ment by the fairy god-mother. I saw one of these tiny baby 



120 

carriages in Osaka, and it was among the most curious of 
the many curiosities of street scenes in Japan. Leaving 
Yokohama to go to Tokio, the great modern capital, or Kioto, 
the ancient and venerated city, the foreigner enters a dwarf 
car on a narrow-gauge track and is pulled by a miniature 
engine over lilliputian bridges and through lilliputian tun- 
nels. Wherever he visits he finds narrow streets, small 
frail houses, with tiny rooms and furnishings. As the 
streets are alleys, so the horses are ponies. Going into the 
country he finds that the farms are gardens of minute pro- 
portions, in which rice and tea and grain are cultivated with 
the microscopic attention bestowed by the European gar- 
dener upon his choicest plants. The little "Jap," with his 
diminutive farm and his toy house, eats from a table which 
is a lacquer tray, from a bowl which is a cup, and from a 
cup which is as a thimble, and smokes a pipe which allows 
him but three whiffs before it needs refilling. In gardening 
his proudest achievement is to dwarf a maple or pine tree. 
so that, though a century old, it is only a foot high, and to 
confine the veteran of the forest in a flower pot. The same 
tendency is noticeable in the arts, in minute ivory and wood 
carvings, in microscopic cloisonne work, and in devotion 
to the small and delicate in painting upon a great variety 
of materials. 

MOTHER GOOSE IN JAPAN. 

In short, there can be no doubt that Mother Goose, in the 
course of her world-wide wanderings on her broom, had piiid 
a thing visit to Japan, and had that miniature country and 
people in mind when she wrote : 

"There was a little man and he had a little wife, 
Who cut their little loaf with a sharp but tiny knife, 
Slip had a little cat which chased a little mouse, 
And they all lived together in a very little house." 

The quaint smallness of things Japanese is most keenly 
appreciated through contrast by an American, fresh from 
the magnificent distances and vast expanses of the land of so 
many "greatesl things on earth." from grand canons and 
mammoth caves to monuments and waterfalls, geysers and 
machinery. 

But, as I have already indicated, if Japan is the vest- 
pockei edition of a nation in material things, in spirit and 



121 

ambition it is a giant unabridged. The Japanese people, 
from the coolie, with his loin cloth and straw sandals, to 
the statesman, are full of that devotion to the national idea, 
that pride of country, that unbounded faith in the national 
future, of which the combination is the world over described 
at home as intense patriotism and abroad as national "cocki- 
ness" and bumptious conceit. The Japanese statesmen are 
already in imagination inheriting the power now wielded by 
the effete nations of Europe, whose speedy exhaustion they 
predict. 

As a sample specimen, listen to the words of Count Oku- 
ma. recently the minister of foreign affairs and the strong 
man of the late administration: 

"The European powers are already showing symptoms of 
decay, and the next century will see their constitutions shat- 
tered and their empires in ruins. Even if this should not 
quite happen, their resources will have become exhausted 
in unsuccessful attempts at colonization. Therefore who is 
fit to be their proper successors if not ourselves? What 
nation, except Germany, France, Kussia, Austria and Italy, 
can put 200,000 men into the field inside of a month? As to 
intellectual power, the Japanese mind is in every way equal 
to the European mind. It is true, the Japanese are small 
of stature, but the superiority of the body depends more on 
its constitution than on its size. If treaty revision w r ere 
completed, and Japan completely victorious over China, we 
should become one of the chief powers of the w T orld, and no 
power could engage in any movement without first consult- 
ing us. Japan could then enter into competition with Eu- 
rope as the representative of the oriental races." 

The Japanese statesmen, headed by Marquis Ito, who, 
after a period of retirement from power, is again prime min- 
ister, played upon this patriotic sentiment in precipitating 
war with China. It is a common device of rulers to pick a 
quarrel with the foreigner in order to solidify the home peo- 
ple. But there was never a more successful resort to it 
than in the case of Japan. Her government was beset by 
domestic dissensions and in sore straits. Three successive 
hostile majorities had appeared against it in the diet. From 
the moment that war was declared every opponent and every 
critic disappeared. AH Japan advanced, and struck as one 
man, and the loose-jointed, disorganized, anaemic giant 
China went down before it at the first blow. 

The spirii which made Japan formidable against China 
was intensified by the result of the struggle. And it is con- 



122 

spicuous everywhere in Japan to-day and is carefully fost- 
ered by the government. 

JAPANESE PATRIOTISM. 

Said Count Okuma in a speech before the Oriental Asso- 
ciation of Japan: "Undoubtedly Japan is a comparatively 
poor country, but the abounding patriotism of her subjects 
in spite of her poverty is unique. Foreigners were therefore 
astonished at the love of country showm by the people and 
at the vast sums of money placed at the disposition of the 
government, which permitted the prosecution of the war to 
a successful conclusion without having recourse to foreign 
capital. 

"If, how T ever, those countries should injure Japan's pres- 
tige, rights or interests, I need hardly affirm that the pa- 
triotism of the 40,000,000 Japanese w T ould, as I have already 
said, burst out like a volcanic eruption." 

Every influence tends to keep the patriotic spirit at white 
heat. Not only the adults are drilling all over Japan, but 
the children also. In the schools the pupils bow with rever- 
ence to the portrait of the emperor in entering and leaving 
the room, and love of country is taught both in their secular 
and their religious education. 

In the grounds connected with the temple of Hirano Jinja 
in Kioto I noticed some school children at their recess re- 
creation. They had divided into two bands, armed with 
wooden swords and guns, each army with its standard. One 
lay in ambush for the other, and the surprised army re- 
treated until a little hill was reached, on top of which a 
stand was made, and the pursuers beaten back. Young 
America could not have entered into mimic warfare with 
greater spirit. 

Shintoism, the original faith and the present state re- 
ligion of Japan, is practically patriotism and not much else. 
Its foundation is the worship of ancestors, thence of the 
emperor, as the heaven-born father of his people. Devotion 
to the ruler easily becomes love of the fatherland which is 
ruled. Patriotic loyalty to the emperor is religion, and in 
this kind of religion there are many fanatics. 

The worship of one's own ancestors, derived from China, 
has been broadened in Japan into the worship of the hero 
ancestors of other men, who, deified after death, constitute 
the Shinto pantheon with its membership of millions. The 
famous soldiers and other heroes are honored and worshiped 



123 

in shrines erected to their memory. Keligion lights the 
torch of patriotism. 

Osaka, which as Japan's great manufacturing city is the 
center of the industrial war which the empire is to wage 
against Europe and America, is also an important military 
center, and in that city this spring I attended a Shinto 
service which showed clearly the manner in which all the in 
iluences of state and church unite to foster loyalty to the 
emperor and love of country. 

WORSHIP FOR DEAD SOLDIERS. 

Close to the one large hotel for foreigners in Osaka is a 
monument to certain soldiers who fell in battle. A Shinto 
shrine is connected with the monument, and on the 6th day 
of May the annual military service was held there in honor 
of the heroes, attended by all the soldiers in the district, 
officers and men, infantry and cavalry, and by a multitude 
of curious visitors from civil life. On one side of the inclo- 
sure, in front of the shrine, stood the officers in uniform, 
from seventy-five to a hundred in number. At their feet, sit- 
ting on mats, were a hundred or more of sons of the officers, 
in semi-military dress. On the opposite side of the inclosure 
were a brass band and a small group of spectators. Out- 
side, in the adjacent tea house, and in intersecting streets, 
the people were packed and jammed, constantly harassed, 
shoved and pushed and scolded by the important little 
Jananese soldiers. . Back of the monument glimpses 
could be had of the arms or uniforms of the thousands of 
soldiers, standing ready for the order to march. First the 
procession of priests in white robes, with curious black 
headdress and black wooden shoes, entered the inclosure, 
headed by wooden palanquins containing the offerings. 
Then the long and rather tedious Shinto service proceeded. 
The offerings of many different articles, including fruits 
and vegetables, were passed from hand to hand, and pre 
sented before the shrine. At last the officers came before 
the monument in succession and presented branches handed 
to them by a priest. Then the officers gradually withdrew, 
and 12,000 soldiers inarched before the monument, in small 
bodies, halted and saluted at the word of command and to 
the sound of trumpets, and passed on quickly to make room 
for another detachment. After several hours of infantry 
procession, the cavalry passed and saluted in similar fashion. 
Neither young nor old could fail to be impressed by the 



124 

spectacle of honor, even worship, offered to those who had 
died in the service of their country, and to be inspired with 
the patriotic desire to emulate their example. 

The national military spirit is fostered not only in school 
and in church, so to speak, but in the very holidays and an- 
niversary days of the boys. As I have already noted the 
boj-s' day on the 5th of May is permeated with Jingoism, 
Shintoisrn, patriotism. 

Japan's national ambition is thus gigantic. Will she be 
able to realize a fraction of her dreams? 

A VISION OF CONQUEST. 

Her cry is "Asia for the Asiatics," meaning by the Asiat- 
ics the Japanese. She is spending the Chinese indemnity 
and much tax money out of the scanty resources of her own 
people in army and navy development to meet, resist and, if 
possible, overcome Russia in Asia before the Siberian rail- 
road connects the two Russias, and gives to the government 
at St. Petersburg power of concentrating troops, which 
would prove irresistible. She has a well-disciplined and ad- 
mirably equipped army of considerably over 200,000 men, 
more than double the Russian force laboriously collected 
at Vladivostok. Her navy, already imposing, will before 
long be among the strongest five in the world, surpassing 
the United States in the race unless our gait is faster than at 
present. Her people have surreptitiously aided the insur- 
gents in the Philippine Islands, now the property of Spain, 
upon which Japan has for some time cast covetous eyes. 
She planned a peaceful conquest by colonization of the Ha- 
waiian Islands, and nothing but annexation by the United 
Slates is certain to baffle her well-conceived design. In 
trade, as well as in arms, she aspires not only to lead in 
Asia, but to be among the great powers of the world. Her 
vast military expenditures have interfered sadly with na- 
tional industrial development, but the ambition to be weal- 
thy is merely postponed in favor of the determination to be 
powerful, and not by any means abandoned. 

It is impossible not to admire the high aims and courage 
of this people, as well as their kindliness, their ingenuity, 
their manual dexterity and their artistic taste. 

The dwarf in material things has expanded into the giant 
like the great pine at Karasaki, a tree which started 
out to be a dwarfed pine with sprawling horizontally grow- 
ing branches after the regular model, but which escaped 



L25 

from its would-be ihimmizers two thousand years ago, and 
is now a magnified dwarf pine, enlarged five hundred times. 

Can Japan, so admirable in small things, be equally ad- 
mirable when the dwarf has become the giant? 

Has the Japanese character the adaptability of the ele- 
phant's trunk, with its capacity of picking up the smallest 
pin and of performing the most delicate operations and also 
its power of applying gigantic force in breaking down walls 
and uprooting trees? 

The Japanese has nothing more to learn, he thinks, in 
either the deceptions or the bluffs and ultimatums of diplo- 
macy. He believes that he has discovered the secret of the 
occidental powers in the maxims, "Might makes right," 
"Providence is on the side with the heavier artillery," and 
he arms and drills himself, buys guns and warships, and 
discards his foreign instructors. 

If the Aztecs in Mexico had handled the Spaniards on the 
Japanese principle of dealing with threatening conquerors 
they would have received the invaders with reverential pros- 
trations, and in a comparatively short time they would in 
humble imitation of the visitors be wearing armor, riding 
horses, studying Spanish and mastering the secrets of the 
foreigners' power; and finally, when all was learned that 
the Spanish had to teach, the Aztecs would have opposed to 
them their own weapons and their own military methods, 
and would have cast them out like oranges sucked dry. 

Japan means to cut a figure in history. Will a new Jingo 
give birth for her benefit to a modern god of war, and an- 
other leyasu arise to lead to victory? Or will the Japanese 
vision of glory collapse, bubble-like, at the first hostile con- 
tact with a European power? 



JAPAN ANJ) HAWAII. 



Asiatic Excitement over Our Proposed Tariff— Japan 
Speaks through Count Okuma— Hawaiian Annexa- 
tion and Our Duty on Tea and Silk— Future of the 
Far East. 

[Editorial correspondence of the Evening Star.] 

Tokyo, Japan, June 8, 1897. 

The immigration controversy between Hawaii, which is 
virtually under American protection, and Japan, the dis- 
patch of both Japanese and American warships to Honolulu, 
and the Congressional proposition to tax heavily under the 
new tariff the cheap silk, tea and matting of Japan have 
caused many manifestations of anti- American sentiment re- 
cently among certain classes of this people. Mischief-mak- 
ers, using the native press, and political agitators, with the 
purpose in view of currying favor for themselves with the 
people and of embarrassing the existing Japanese adminis- 
tration, have misrepresented the facts and labored zealously 
to inflame the popular prejudices. For instance, our tariff 
legislation is represented to be a blow aimed specifically 
at Japan, demonstrating a change of sentiment on our part 
and a present strong dislike and fear of that nation. Not 
only is Hawaii pictured as defenseless before Japan, but 
the United States itself is represented to be, as Rudyard 
Kipling suggests, temptingly spankable. 

Another cause of ill-feeling by the Japanese toward the 
foreigners of the empire, including Americans, is the uncon- 
cealed diead with which the latter note the approach of the 
year 1899, when the new treaties go into effect, which abol- 
ish the consular courts and extend Japanese jurisdiction 
over all residents of the empire. Many of the foreigners en- 
gaged in trade profess to fear both loss of personal security 
and destruction of business. They point to the various in- 
dications of the popular belief that the foreigners are to be 
driven out of the Japanese trade and of the increasing hos- 
tility of the people to outsiders. They call attention to the 
recent action of the diet of the empire in passing a bounty 



127 

act granting a subsidy to Japanese exporters of raw silk, 
which they view as a virtual rebate of the export duty for 
the benefit of their Japanese competitors and a discrimina- 
tion against them. Their distrust and dislike are noted and 
reciprocated by the Japanese. 

For Americans to be surrounded by an atmosphere of hos- 
tility in Japan is a novelty. They have heretofore been ex- 
cepted when the anti-foreign cry was raised. Even now, 
of course, the feeling against them is confined to a compara- 
tively few among the people, does not extend seriously to 
the thoughtful and governing class and is, perhaps, tempo- 
rarily fostered and exaggerated for the purpose of retaining 
for Japan as long as possible some trade or labor-colonizing 
advantages now enjoyed, which, it is- perceived, must at 
some time be surrendered, but of which the surrender may 
be postponed. 

INTERVIEWING COUNT OKUMA. 

I obtained the government view of the situation, or as 
much of that view as the government was willing to dis- 
close, in an interview with Count Okuma, the min- 
ister of foreign affairs, who is the strong man 
and dominating spirit of the present administra- 
tion. He played a prominent part in the restora- 
tion of the imperial government in 1868 and since 
that time has been conspicuous in Japanese political history 
as a statesman and leader, whether in the administration 
or in opposition. He was minister of the treasury from 
1873 to 1881, and once before his present term as minister 
of foreign affairs he held the same portfolio. He is conse- 
quently a statesman of ripened experience, thoroughly iden- 
tified with the new Japan. He has been and is now a strong 
and uncompromising advocate of the adoption by Japan of 
modern foreign methods. One of the cries of the leaders 
of the revolution of 1868, who Overthrew the Shoguns, usur- 
pers of two centuries' standing, and restored to the mikado 
the temporal power, was the expulsion of the foreigners 
and the return of Japan to her previous condition of isola- 
tion. But the brainy men who led this movement, when 
once in power, judged accurately the situation and changed 
their views and their policy with lightning rapidity. They 
welcomed the foreigner, and for a time sat at liis feet in 
order to learn all that he could teach. 



THE FOREIGNERS MUST GO. 

Bat the}- stooped to conquer. They learned merely to 
compete with their teachers and with the purpose of discard- 
ing these instructors as soon as they thought that they 
could do without them. Count Okuma in a speech deliv- 
ered not long ago before the Oriental Society attributed 
the progress in Japan very largely to foreign influence, ex- 
tolled the foreign models and methods and criticised un- 
sparingly, with a view to improvement, his people's short- 
comings in many respects when compared with the so-called 
civilized nations. Possibly Count Okuma thinks that the 
process of throwing aside the foreigner as an orange sucked 
dry has begun too soon and is proceeding too rapidly. But 
certain factions among the people are impatient, political 
opponents are ever ready to raise the cry of subserviency 
to the foreigner and the assassin lurks in the background. 

Of the latter Count Okuma bears with him a constant re- 
minder in the shape of a disabled leg, shattered by a bomb 
thrown at him by a political fanatic, who concluded that 
the count, who was then minister of foreign affairs, was 
yielding too much to the foreigners in the matter of treaty 
revision, and selected this form of remonstrance. But 
Count Okuma, while he sees clearly the advantages derived 
by Europe and America from the superiority of their meth- 
ods, and believes in the most thorough and complete imita- 
tion and adoption of them by the Japanese, does not thereby 
admit in the slightest degree the superiority of the foreigner 
himself. He wishes to arm the Japanese with every known 
artificial weapon in order that, conditions being equal, his 
countrymen may demonstrate the natural superiority with 
which he credits them. The extent of the count's belief in 
Japanese capacity and of his ambition for Japan's future 
is indicated in a speech delivered by him before he was 
made for the second time minister of foreign affairs, and 
when he could talk with greater freedom than as a member 
of the administration. As quoted by Henry Norman in his 
"Peoples and Politics of the Far East," the count on this 
occasion said: 

"The European powers are already showing symptoms of 
decay, and the next century will see their constitutions shat- 
tered and their empires in ruins. Even if this should not 
quite happen, their resources will have become exhausted in 
unsuccessful attempts at colonization. Therefore who is 
lii to be their proper successors if not ourselves? What 



129 

nation except Germany, France, Russia, Austria, and Italy 
can put 200,000 men into the field inside of a month? As 
to intellectual power, the Japanese mind is in every way 
equal to the European mind. It is true the Japanese are 
small of stature, but the superiority of the body depends 
more on its constitution than on its size. If treaty revision 
were completed, and Japan completely victorious over 
China, we should become one of the chief powers of the 
world, and no power could engage in any movement without 
first consulting us. Japan could then enter into competi- 
tion with Europe as the representative of the oriental races." 
This digression may serve to suggest what manner of man 
Count Okuma is, and may also throw some light upon the 
guarded statements of his interview. 

AMERICAN TOBACCO IN JAPAN. 

I met Count Okuma in the reception room of the foreign 
office at Tokyo, in sight of the spot where he was crippled by 
the would-be assassin's bomb. On a table in the center 
of the room in evidence of the prevailing national habit was 
a plentiful supply of cigarettes and a complete smoking out- 
fit for the use of visitors. The count entered with a cigar- 
ette in his mouth and smoked constantly during the inter- 
view. Incidentally it may be mentioned that the count is 
credited with objecting to the tobaccoless cigarettes so large- 
ly used by the Japanese, with thinking that their use tends 
to prevent the desired increase of the stature of the nation, 
and with a disposition to encourage increased importations 
of real tobacco from America. Mr. Mitsuhashi, his private 
secretary, served as the intelligent and accurate interpreter 
of our conversation. 

The lines upon the count's smooth-shaven face and his 
scanty gray hairs suggest his age of nearly sixty years. His 
face is a strong one, with a good forehead, prominent cheek- 
bones, a broad flat nose, and a large, firm mouth, with a 
cynical half-smile lurking at each upward-tending corner. 
He talks quickly and fluently, and gives his interpreter a 
great deal to remember before he stops to take breath. 
His projecting teeth, showing a conspicuous gold filling, 
are very much in evidence when he speaks, and make as 
vivid an impression upon the spectator as those of Theodore 
Roosevelt. 

After, the customary health queries and an interchange 
of courtesies concerning the comparative facilities and en- 



,130 

joyments of travel in Japan and the United States, I re- 
ferred to the hostile comment upon the proposed new tariff 
of the United States in the native press and chambers of 
commerce, and asked whether in the count's opinion there 
was any danger of a material lessening of the traditional 
friendly feeling of Japan toward the United States in this 
connection. 

PROTESTS AGAINST THE PROPOSED TARIFF. 

He replied: "The Japanese nation at large, the bulk of 
whom are agriculturists, has not shown any signs of dis- 
content with the proposed tariff. But manufacturers, mer- 
chants and other residents in the districts in which silk, tea 
and matting are produced, are much disturbed. I have re- 
cently returned from a trip through the south, visiting Shi- 
zuoka, Osaka, Kolee and Kioto, the districts noted for silk 
and tea, and the discontent in these sections is great. Since 
Japan was introduced, so to speak, to the civilized world, 
by the United States, and since at the time of the restoration 
Japan was largely assisted by the American minister, Mr. 
Townsend Harris, and since the trade relations of the two 
countries are so extensive that between one-third and one- 
fourth of our entire exports goes to the United States, nat- 
urally a very friendly feeling has been entertained by Japan 
toward the United States, and our exporters to America 
were anxious to increase the imports from that country in 
return for articles bought from us. Largely through the 
efforts of these men the imports of such products as iron, 
locomotives, timber, flour, kerosene oil and cotton have 
largely increased and would continue to increase even faster 
in the future if the conditions were unchanged. The im- 
ports of cotton alone directly from the United States prom- 
ise soon to equal the value of silk exports to the United 
States from Japan. In the same spirit a Japanese line of 
steamers runs to Seattle in the United States. An- 
other, wiih steamers now building, will run to 
San Francisco. These lines have not only the ob- 
ject of encouraging exports from Japan, but imports from 
the United States to Japan. But the proposed tariff, if en- 
acted, amounting to about 100 per cent, on Japan's tea and 
silk, will have the effect of causing the Japanese who are 
thereby injured not to welcome American goods as hereto- 
fore. America's kerosene will suffer in the keen competi- 
tion with that of Russia, its iron with that of Belgium, 



131 

England and Germany, its cotton with that of China, Egypt 
and India. These opinions have been expressed in the 
chambers of commerce of the tea and silk districts and are 
being reflected and repeated throughout the empire. There 
is a report here that the Senate will reduce the duty on silk, 
tea and matting, and confirmation of it is awaited with anx- 
iety. Should, however, the tariff bill pass even in the shape 
proposed by the Senate committee it cannot fail to injure 
seriously the trade between the two countries, both in im- 
ports and exports." 

NOT A BLOW AT JAPAN. 

I called attention to some public utterances, which as- 
sumed that our proposed tariff legislation on tea, silk, and 
matting, was a direct and intentional blow aimed at Japan, 
and asked the count if that was a prevalent belief. 

He said: "At first the Japanese did think that the legis- 
lation was aimed at them, but I have already taken meas- 
ures to explain the matter, and now they believe only the 
truth. When the question first arose I received hundreds 
of memorials on the subject, some of them even accusing me 
of inefficiency for not officially interfering. I replied to 
these memorials that if the law really made a specific dis- 
crimination against Japan I should interfere officially. But 
it did not thus discriminate. Other nations were affected. 
There is an unintentional discrimination perhaps arising 
from the fact that the tea and silk of Japan are cheaper than 
those of its competitors, and that a specific duty of so much 
for a certain quantity without regard to its quality bears 
most heavily upon the cheapest goods. For instance, a duty 
of 10 cents per pound would tax 100 per cent, the average 
Japan tea, while it would tax but 50 per cent, the average 
Indian tea, the former costing about one-half the latter. 1 
doubt whether a heavy duty on tea would ultimately be of 
benefit to the United States. The cost of our cheap tea 
would be largely increased to the consumers, who are, I un- 
derstand, the middle and lower classes. As your Congress 
represents the mass of the people who would be thus affected 
it seems doubtful whether such legislation could pass the 
representatives of the people, or be beneficial if passed." 

I remarked that the Japanese law granting a bounty to 
Japanese exporters of raw silk had been drawn into the 
controversy, other exporters claiming that the act was a dis 
crimination against them, being practically a rebate of the 



132 

export duty, and some of the Japanese suggesting that our 
tariff legislation concerning tea and silk was in retaliation 
for this legislation. I suggested that if the United States 
should retaliate at all the retaliation would be direct and 
unmistakable, imposing an additional duty equivalent to 
the bounty. 

THE BOUNTY TO JAPANESE SILK EXPORTERS.' 

The count replied that of course the bounty act had no 
connection whatever with the proposed tariff. "This act is 
not intended to apply injuriously to foreigners, and if it has 
any such effect, that result will be unavoidable under the 
present treaties. Until the new treaties go into effect for- 
eigners are not amenable to our laws, and if the bounty 
were extended to them, as well as to the Japanese, and any 
of them should profit by its provisions through false pre- 
tenses or otherwise break the Japanese laws in this connec- 
tion, Japan could not punish them. This is the reason that 
foreigners are not included in the law." 

I asked whether, this being the case, the bounty would be 
extended to foreigners when the new treaties did go into 
effect and they became amenable to Japanese laws. 

The count replied that the law would probably be amend- 
ed at that time in some way to suit the circumstances. 
In response to questions, the count said that the bounty act 
is to go into effect on April 1, 1898, and the new treaties 
July, 1899. 

HOW TO INCREASE TRADE WITH JAPAN. 

I asked what other steps than a reduction of the proposed 
tariff on silk, tea and matting the count would suggest for 
the purpose of increasing trade between the United States 
and Japan. 

He replied: "Within a few years I have repeatedly ex- 
pressed the opinion to the president of the chamber of com- 
merce of New York, correspondents of American papers 
and many others witli whom I have conversed that the most 
important factor in increasing this trade will be intelligent 
and unceasing activity on the part of the consular represen- 
tatives of the United States in studying local conditions and 
needs, and making them known to the American manufac- 
turers and merchants. Enlarged facilities of communica- 
tion will also increase trade. The Japanese steamers ran- 



133 

ning to Seattle return with full cargoes. The Great North- 
ern Railway, with which it connects, is anxious that the 
service shall be doubled. The new Japanese line to San 
Francisco will doubtless have a similar effect in increasing 
American exports to Japan." 

THE TROUBLE WITH HAWAII. 

"What is the present status of the Hawaiian contro- 
versy?" 

"For some unknown reason the Hawaiian government has 
obstructed the immigration of Japanese into Hawaii which 
it had previously invited. Three ship loads have been 
stopped, and not only the people on these ships, but others 
on their way to Hawaii, have suffered damage. This act 
is in violation of treaty. Previous to that event the Hawaii- 
an assembly adopted a measure imposing a heavy duty upon 
Japanese sake, an unmistakable and objectionable discrim- 
ination. Japan is compelled to take a serious view of the 
matter and to conduct strong negotiations on the subject. 
Twenty-eight years ago the first batch of Japanese immi- 
grants went to Hawaii. About eleven years ago immigra- 
tion was resumed under a treaty with Hawaii, signed at 
the request of the Hawaiian government, which was then 
anxious to replace Chinese by Japanese as laborers on the 
islands. Since that time large numbers of Japanese have 
gone to Hawaii, until now there are about 25,000 of them 
there, peaceable, law-abiding people, still well-liked by the 
owners of the land and planters who employ them. But 
for some reason several members of the present Hawaiian 
cabinet represent that the large and increasing number of 
Japanese is detrimental to the country, and indeed threat- 
ens its independence. They seem to have no such fear of 
an increase in the number of Chinese, whom they previously 
disliked. 

NO MENACE TO HAWAIIAN INDEPENDENCE. 

"The Japanese government and the Japanese people have 
no idea of menacing the independence of Hawaii. Nothing 
could be farther from their wishes and purposes. They 
will be quite content if their treaty rights are observed and 
respected. Japan's position is so just and reasonable that 
I fully expect a satisfactory settlement by negotiations, and 
do not apprehend any serious trouble. 



134 

"No; there is no deadlock, no issue joined, as reported in 
the papers. The negotiations are progressing." 

"If the two governments are unable to agree, is the issue 
one which would properly be referred to arbitration?" 

"I do not think the matter so serious as to render arbitra- 
tion necessary. If the two countries cannot come to an 
agreement, resort to arbitration may be the alternative. 
But as the Japanese government does not ask anything but 
what is reasonable I hope that the matter may be settled be- 
tween the two governments exclusively." 

I called attention to the printed statement that drilled 
soldiers had been sent to Hawaii in the guise of laborers. 

He said: "There is no foundation whatever for the report 
in the sense intended. Japan has a general system of con- 
scription, requiring three years of service, beginning at 
the age of twenty, from all who pass the examination. 
There are over 20,000 men every year who are relieved from 
this service and return home to their farms and other occu- 
pations. Some of these men may have gone to Hawaii to 
labor in the fields there, but they are agriculturists, not 
soldiers." 

"Is it not possible that if the Japanese in Hawaii are per- 
mitted to increase until they form a majority in numbers 
and power they may get beyond the control of the far-re- 
moved home government, and make serious trouble in spite 
of the just and friendly attitude of the government of 
Japan?" 

"I do not entertain any such apprehension. An order 
issued by the consul general in Hawaii is now effective 
throughout the 25,000 immigrants. They are peaceable and 
law-abiding people, who go there with no other object than 
money-making. Obedience to legal authority is a natural 
characteristic of them. I do not believe that there would 
be any trouble if the number were indefinitely increased." 

NO DANGER OF A PEACEFUL REVOLUTION. 

"If the Japanese had a majority of the population might 
they not overturn the existing government and gain control 
merely by demanding and securing representation in the 
Hawaiian legislative body?" 

"Most of the Japanese do not go there to reside for any 
length of time. They return to Japan after a few years of 
money-making. The individual Japanese in Hawaii are 
constantly changing. They have no political interest in 



135 

the country. There would be no danger of the Japanese 
obtaining control of the islands if they were fully admitted 
as voters in the representative government. With a long 
residence qualification and ability to speak and write Eng- 
lish very few of these contract laborers and temporary so- 
journers would qualify. Nearly all of the first and earlier 
batches of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii have already 
returned to Japan, and those who are there are in the main 
immigrants of the last few years, who will in turn come 
back to Japan, who are now not concentrated at Honolulu, 
but scattered over the plantations, working hard, and en- 
tirely harmless and unobjectionable, to the great satisfac- 
tion of those who are employing them." 

"What is the Japanese government's opinion of the rela- 
tions between the United States and Hawaii?" 

INTIMATE RELATIONS OF HAWAII AND THE UNJTED STATES. 

"Japan recognizes that the relations between the United 
States and Hawaii are very intimate. The Americans are 
in a majority among the whites on the islands. They own 
most of the property. They have a large majority in the 
present cabinet. As Hawaii lies between the United States 
and Japan, somewhat nearer to the United States, some peo- 
ple on the islands have already sought annexation by the 
United States. But that republic should be satisfied -with 
upholding the independence of Hawaii. Both the United 
States and Japan have an interest in maintaining the status 
quo. This arrangement is most beneficial for all concerned. 
I cannot understand that the United States should desire 
to annex Hawaii. Politically it would be a mistake, and 
strategically the great strength of the United States lies in 
her solidarity." 

"Suppose that the United States should annex Hawaii, 
is Japan's interest in the islands such as to entitle her to 
protest against annexation or to view the act as unjust or 
unfriendly to her?" 

"It is difficult to express an opinion on that subject now. 
I do not believe for an instant that annexation will come 
to pass. I believe that the Japanese, as a nation, would 
greatly deplore such a consummation, if it should be ef- 
fected?' 

"On what lines is Japanese development now proceeding 
most rapidly?" 

"The great purpose which Japan oughl to pursue, and is 



136 

pursuing, is to raise to a higher level her position in the 
eyes of the world. To do this it is important to strengthen 
and extend her system of common education. Japanese 
commercial money-making ability, tending to make the na- 
tion wealthier, must also be increased, and to that end edu- 
cation is necessary. It is also essential to advance and ex- 
tend female education, the higher education of women. 
Better progress must also be made in the study of science." 

JAPANESE NATIONAL SENTIMENT. 

I referred to the indications of a strono- national senti- 
ment among the Japanese and to the wise policy of the au- 
thorities in fostering that sentiment in the schools and in 
the services of the national religion, especially in memorial 
services, honoring those who fell in battle. 

The count responded with enthusiasm: "That principle 
or sentiment forms the fundamental basis of all our educa- 
tion. The Japanese is taught to place the emperor, the 
ruler of his country, in the first place in his thoughts and 
in his reverence, and his nation vis-a-vis other countries. 

"One fault observable in our previous system of educa- 
tion was the tendency to over-educate the mind at the ex- 
pense of the body. Bodily, semi-military exercises in the 
schools and among the young men are going on not only 
in the cities, but even in the remotest districts of the em- 
pire." 

I said that I had observed this universal drilling and mili- 
tary, or senii-military. exercising, and that on the surface 
it seemed as if the whole nation, young and old, ,was pre- 
paring itself to fight somebody. 

The count responded laughingly: "The Japanese are a 
peace-loving people. What they seek is the healthful phys- 
ical development, the bodily education, of the nation. They 
are not planning and, indeed, have no desire or inclination 
to fight anybody." 

IMPROVE THE CONSULAR SERVICE. 

Count Okuma's suggestion of the importance of the co- 
operation of our consular service in building up foreign 
trade and of the need of greater efficiency on the part of 
those agents is sound and touches a weak point in our line 
of assault upon the markets of the world. Our consuls 
must be active, energetic men of affairs, and the greater 



137 

their experience and knowledge of the business conditions 
and methods of the country to which they are sent the more 
valuable will their services be. In China and Japan at 
present our consuls are judges in courts of extensive juris- 
diction. These offices with their important commercial 
and judicial functions should cease to be classed in the 
category of rewards for partisan or personal political ser- 
vices to be distributed as tokens of grateful appreciation 
of skill in manipulating primaries or a convention or some 
particular class of voters. But Count Okuma's criticism 
while well founded as a general proposition would be unjust 
if it were construed as applying to the American consulate 
closest at hand. It is generally conceded that the improve- 
ments in our export trade to Japan, which Count Okuma 
credits largely to the friendly offices of the Japanese traders, 
are in great measure due to the intelligent and persevering 
labors of Consul General Mclvor at Yokohama. Especially 
is this true in relation to the increased importations of cot- 
ton, and to the development now in progress of our exports 
of lumber. Sentiment plays a small part in international 
trade. While Japan's grateful affection for us was at its 
height, and while we were buying far more from her than 
any other nation in the world, she bought very little from 
us and patronized instead the Englishmen whom she heart- 
ily disliked. Sentiment is not responsible for the recent 
increases in her American purchases. In the case of cot- 
ton, for instance, she now buys directly from us instead of 
indirectly through Liverpool, because Mr. Mclvor convinced 
the owners of the Japanese cotton mills that it was econ- 
omy to dispense with the commission to a middleman and 
put them in the way of obtaining a cheap freight rate for 
the cotton from American rail loads. The individual pur- 
chaser of cotton or iron or kerosene oil in Japan will buy 
that article wherever he can get it to the best advantage, 
and will not permit national friendliness or unfriendliness 
to ait'ect his individual pocket book. 

These considerations minimize apprehensions of a reduc- 
tion of the volume of our exports to Japan in case of the 
imposition by Congress of a heavy duty upon tea, silk and 
matting. Japan under the new treaties will herself soon 
be increasing largely her present duties on imports and her 
government will of course as a matter of policy carefully 
avoid taking any position at this time which imputes un- 
friendliness in such increases on the part of the importing 
toward the exporting nation. 



138 



JAPAN S INTENTIONS CONCERNING HAWAII. 

There is no reason to question the sincerity of the dis- 
avowal by the Japanese government of covetous inclina- 
tions toward Hawaii. It speaks for today, not for next 
year, or the next decade, and it speaks for itself alone, not 
for the individual Japanese either in Japan or Hawaii. In 
the immediate future Japan has "other fish to fry." The 
keynote of Japan's foreign policy is sounded in the quoted 
words of Count Okuma: "Japan could then enter into com- 
petition with Europe as the representative of the oriental 
races." "Asia for the Asiatics" is the Japanese Monroe 
doctrine, and as the only genuine nation of the far east, as 
the only oriental people welded together into homogeneous 
and powerful combination by a strong national sentiment, 
they are or aspire to be the Asiatics for whom exclusively 
Asia is reserved. Defeat of even the smallest realization 
of this ambitious hope is threatened by Russia, w T hich pre- 
vented Japan from securing a foothold on the Asiatic con- 
tinent as a result of her victory over China, and which will 
soon, it is evident, take for her own use that which she com- 
pelled Japan to relinquish. With the completion of the 
Siberian railroad to a terminus in a seaport open all of the 
year, at present in the possession of China or Corea, Russia 
will dominate the Pacific. She can concentrate through her 
railroad an overwhelming land force for Asiatic use, and her 
.strong navy will be at home in her Pacific harbors, to co- 
operate with army and fortifications. Russia and Japan 
aspire to play the same role in Asia, and only one can be 
successful. The Japanese people have not entertained the 
slightest doubt of their ability to whip the Russians in Asia 
in a fight between the two armies, and their only apprehen- 
sion has related to their navy, which they have been inces- 
santly strengthening. Russia is steadily massing troops 
and collecting warships at Vladivostock. Japan is spend- 
ing the Chinese indemnity and much other money in war- 
ships, in fortifications and in army development. All Japan 
is drilling, for the sake of its health, as Count Okuma says. 
If there is not a collision in the near future between these 
opposing forces it will be because Japan confesses defeat in 
advance, and abandons her dream of Asiatic supremacy. 
Clearly Russia will fight for a winter seaport on the Pacific. 
For centuries she has been bottled up and confined to har- 
bors closed by ice for half the year. In the eyes not only 
of apprehensive Japan, but of uneasy England, she is now, 



139 

like the Afrite in the Arabian Nights, about to escape from 
the bottle and to expand in stature until her head touches 
the sky. 

JAPAN WANTS THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS 

If Japan abandons the hope of checking Russia in the 
north her next ambition in accordance with the principle 
of "Asia for the Asiatics" is to annex the Philippine Islands, 
her neighbor on the south. Japan does not fear Spain, and 
would, it was whispered, have assented some time ago to a 
petition of the insurgents and have taken a hand in the 
recent fray if she had believed that the European powers 
would permit her to retain possession of the islands. In 
case of a general war in Europe, breaking up the concert 
of the powers, Japan would, it is believed, promptly seize 
the Philippine Islands. With the defeated Chinese to be 
constantly watched, if not feared; with menacing Russia 
to the north; and with Spain as an enemy already made 
in opposition to southern expansion, Japan will not now 
reach out for Hawaii at the risk of offending the United 
States. Hawaii is on the American, not the Asiatic side 
of the Pacific, and the American flag has once floated over 
it. Japan would be sorry to see it annexed by the United 
States, for annexation would close a profitable market for 
the empire's contract labor, and would destroy all hope of 
Japan's ever possessing a point of vast strategic importance 
to the naval control of the north Pacific. But she has no 
such interest in the islands that her present government 
would for a moment contemplate a war over their control. 
It would be more in accord with Japan's national policy 
if the thousands of her people now cultivating as contract 
laborers the sugar lands of Hawaii were developing the rich 
resources of her own Formosa. 

JAPAN HAS TROUBLES OF HER OWN. 

In speculating upon the probable action of Japan in future 
years a distinction must be made between the people and 
the government of the empire. They are not equivalents. 
The control of the latter over the former is not perfect, and 
the tendency is not toward a strengthening of the govern- 
ment. There are internal dissensions, the material out of 
which revolutions are made, among the Japanese. A ma- 
jority of those who have representation in the parliament 



140 

which has been created desire that its nominal powers 
shall become real, and the}' engaged in a fierce struggle 
with the government over the appropriations, attempting 
to coerce the cabinet by cutting off the supplies. Then 
there are sectional jealousies, inflamed by the monopoly of 
office-holding enjoyed by four of the great clans, formerly 
daimiates, since the revolution of 1SG8. The anti-foreign 
sentiment, which is increasing, also tends to make unruly a 
people ordinarily submissive to constituted authorities. 
Ito, one of the greatest of Japanese statesmen, is credited 
with having precipitated the war with China in order to 
unite the wrangling factions and to avoid an internal out- 
break. The result of the war naturally inflated the national 
vanity. The humiliation afterward inflicted by Russia, for 
which the Japanese held their own government partly re- 
sponsible, cut the national pride to the quick. The ten- 
dency of both events is to increase the individual self-asser- 
tiveness of the Japanese. 

In the case of any controversy which wounds Japanese 
sensitiveness, now abnormally excessive, or which threat- 
ens disappointment of any cherished hope of the people, the 
question which will arise is not merely what will a wise 
government, carrying out a definite policy, think or do, but 
what will an excited people permit or compel their rulers to 
do. The expressions of the native press and of individual 
Japanese concerning Hawaii are not so politic and reassur- 
ing as those of the government. 

Japan necessarily plays the waiting game. Discretion 
forbids any more in the direction of Hawaii at this time. 
But if the United States repudiates its semi-protectorate 
over the islands, as for instance by unqualifiedly refusing 
or indefinitely postponing annexation, Japan will absorb 
them naturally and irresistibly without the necessity of any 
open reversal by the Japanese government of its announced 
policy and without requiring from it any action whatsoever. 
It is a significant fact that the Japanese population of 
Hawaii was increased by more than half a thousand merely 
from the three 1 ship loads of immigrants, who, as it is usu- 
ally stated, were stopped and sent back to Japan. To be 
sure more than a thousand were rejected, but 54.3 ran the 
gauntlet and now swell the peaceful army of occupation. 
In spite of everything that the Hawaiian government, un- 
supported, can do, Japanese immigrants will enter in suffi- 
cient numbers to control the affairs of the islands in the 
near future by combination with the royalists and nominal 



141 

restoration of native rule, if not by openly and in the first 
instance making Hawaii a dependency of .Japan. 

If the Hawaiian Islands are to remain a part of America 
and are not to be abandoned to Asia peaceful annexation to 
the United States should be effected at this time, when the 
policy of the Japanese government, which looks to extension 
in other directions, has not been demonstrated to be in any 
respect visionary, and when the Japanese themselves have 
not been aroused and rendered dangerous by the failure of 
any cherished projects in Asia, and both in Japan and 
Hawaii are reasonably well controlled by the government 
at Tokvo. 



HAWAII'S CRISIS. 



Annexation by America or Final Absorption by Japan 
—Japan's Severe Pressure on Hawaii— Arbitration 
Is the Next Move of the Little Republic— No War 
after Annexation. 

[Editorial correspondence of the Evening Star.] 

Honolulu, Hawaii, July 1, 1897. 
The steamer City of Peking, which brought to the islands 
by way of Japan the first information of McKinley's elec- 
tion, performed a similar office in regard to the annexation 
treaty, the definite news that it had been signed, conveyed 
in a cablegram to Yokohama, arriving here by that steamer 
on the 29th of June. With that cablegram as an inspira- 
tion this community worked itself into a state of feverish 
excitement and expectation, many crediting the printed ru- 
mors, based upon alleged private information, to the effect 
that the foreign affairs committee of the Senate had already 
reported favorably upon the treaty, and that a day had even 
been fixed for voting upon it, the 19th of June being the date 
assigned. The coming of the Mariposa from the Pacific 
coast with news a week later than that of the Peking was 
eagerly and impatiently awaited, and when it was learned 
on the arrival of that steamer this morning that the Senate 
had been true to its traditions as a deliberative body and 
that action upon the treaty would not be immediate, the 
disappointment, though unreasonable, was profound. 

STRONG NEGOTIATIONS. 

The news of the signing of the annexation treaty came 
at an interesting point in the war of words called "strong 
negotiations" by Count Okuma, which has been progressing 
between Japan and Hawaii. The Star's regular correspond- 
ent at Honolulu, Kamehameha, has kept its readers thor- 
oughly informed of the various stages of this controversy 
preceding the very recent answer of Mr. Cooper, Hawaiian 
minister of foreign affairs, which Mr. Shimamura, the Jap- 



143 

anese minister, has awaited for some time with unconcealed 
impatience and annoyance. The new matter in this docu- 
ment, unpublished up to the present date, even in Honolulu, 
and of importance as establishing a fresh line of Hawaiian 
defense, is in substance to the following effect: The treaty 
of 1871, which Japan claims to have been violated in this 
rase, is limited in its scope. It applies only to merchant im- 
migrants and not to laborers. This limitation upon the 
treaty has been recognized by Japan in applying it to in- 
coming Hawaiians. 

That the treaty does not apply to laborers is further 
shown by the fact that a labor convention between Japan 
and Hawaii was necessary to regulate the new kind of im- 
migration. The laws passed by Hawaii, following the labor 
convention, of the enforcement of which complaint is now 
made, were not objected to by Japan at the time of their 
enactment as in contravention of the treaty. It follows 
that the treaty does not apply to the cases of any of the 
immigrants in controversy; and that subject to the labor 
convention, which is still in force because six months' no- 
tice of its abrogation is necessary, Hawaii is entitled under 
the general powers of independent governments to make 
and enforce such laws of general application as it deems 
necessary with reference to the admission of aliens. Hawaii 
welcomes immigration in accordance with its laws, labor 
conventions and treaties when they apply. 

JAPAN STILL DISSATISFIED. 

Since the aim of the Japanese minister has been to elicit 
from the Hawaiian government a confession that it had 
violated a treaty in excluding immigrants, a promise of in- 
demnity for the injuries inflicted, and a pledge against sim- 
ilar violations in the future, this explanation would evi- 
dently share the fate of its predecessors in being viewed as 
unsatisfactory by Japan's representative; and as that of- 
ficial had in a newspaper interview thrown out menacing 
intimations of what might happen if Hawaii's answer should 
continue to be unsatisfactory, his course on receipt of the 
reply has been a matter of anxious conjecture. While all 
Hawaii was holding its breath in the intensity of its appre- 
hensive observation of Mr. Shimamura, in suspense lest he 
should shake off Hawaiian dust from his feet and sever 
diplomatic relations with the republic, or should present 
an ultimatum, to be enforced by the guns of the Naniwa, 



144 

there came as an additional element of friction and excite- 
ment the news of the annexation treaty and of Japan's 
protest. 

On my arrival here from Yokohama, eleven days ago, I 
discovered that the question of the possibility of arbitrating 
the immigration question was one of profound local interest. 
In response to a question from me Count Okuma, Japan's 
minister of foreign affairs, had intimated in Tokio that, 
while in view of the justice and reasonableness of Japan's 
position he hoped for a settlement of the matter through 
negotiation by the two governments exclusively, in the 
event of continued disagreement arbitration might be the 
alternative. Minister Shimamura had in a newspaper in- 
terview, indorsed by him as accurate, expressed precisely 
the opposite opinion. He spoke of the controversy as a 
matter involving the honor of Japan, in which, indeed, that 
nation's honor was at stake, and added: "In small affairs 
arbitration may be allowed, but never where the honor of a 
nation is at stake. There is no court where cases in inter- 
national law are tried — the only tribunal is the strong arm 
and the strong vessels. Honor is too sacred a thing to any 
nation to be played with by courts of arbitration." 

A TALK WITH MINISTER SHIMAMURA. 

Shortly after my arrival in Honolulu I called upon Min- 
ister Shimamura for the purpose of interviewing him. He 
is a slender, nervous, frail-looking man, whose black mus- 
tache gives as yet no indications of the gray of even middle 
age. He is notably courteous in manner. He was Japanese 
consul in New York City for some time, and speaks Eng- 
lish fairly well. When at a loss precisely what to say, and 
wishing time to think, he prolongs the final syllable of 

every fifth or sixth word with a long-drawn-out ah — ■. 

or eh to an extent that is painful to the hearer, and 

suggests an impediment of speech. It is said that under 
similar circumstances Daniel Webster was accustomed to 
sink his voice until it became temporarily inaudible. Mr. 
Shimamura's method is just as effective. 

W T e talked over much the same points that were discussed 
in my interview with Count Okuma, except that Mr. Shima- 
mura disclaimed official authority to say anything on the 
subject of annexation. 



145 
IS ARBITRATION ADMISSIBLE? 

When the arbitration matter was brought up he called 
into the room Mr. Akiyama, the special legal adviser sent 
from Tokio to co-operate with him in the settlement of the 
immigration controversy. Mr. Akiyama is smooth-shaven, 
stout, smiling and pugnacious. After much questioning I 
elicited from them a joint answer to the query whether 
this issue was one in respect to which arbitration is admis- 
sible that was much milder in tone than Mr. Shimamura's 
previous utterances. Possibly instructions on the subject 
had been received from Tokyo since the date of the first in- 
terview. Mr. Shimamura said: "I cannot say yet whether 
the matter does or does not fall within the class of cases in 
respect to which arbitration is admissible. Japan is seek- 
ing only justice. Much will depend upon the nature of the an 
swer which I am awaiting from the Hawaiian government. 
Japan may not object to arbitration." 

After the Hawaiian answer above referred to had been 
sent I called again on Mr. Shimamura, reminded him that 
he had made his views concerning the admissibility of ar- 
bitration dependent on the character of Mr. Cooper's reply, 
and asked if there was now anything that he wished to add 
to what he had said on this subject. He replied courteously 
that he could say nothing further concerning arbitration, 
that the whole matter now rested with his home govern- 
ment. We talked for some time about other phases of the 
controversy, and he gave no indication of indignation or ex- 
citement, and no intimation of any sensational action on 
his part, such as demanding his passport, and quitting the 
country, at which he had at one time hinted. 

akiyama's angry outburst. 

Counsellor Akiyama, whom I met in the Hawaiian Hotel, 
was not so restrained and circumspect. He said with much 
heat concerning Mr. Cooper's last letter: "It's smoke, smoke, 
nothing but smoke!" He asked me if I had read the letter. 
I replied in the negative, saying, however, that I thought 
I knew its substance. He snapped out: "It has no sub- 
stance. I am going home on the next steamer. There is 
nothing that I can do here. My government will now settle 
the matter." 



146 
HAWAII TO PROPOSE ARBITRATION. 

The issues in the immigration controversy are now dis- 
tinctly formed. The question is clearly one in respect to 
which arbitration is appropriate, and this fact is recognized 
by Count Okuma, who controls Japanese foreign policy. 
The Hawaiian government may reasonably be expected to 
apply at once for the good offices of the United States to 
bring about such arbitration by some impartial umpire, be- 
fore Japan hurls an ultimatum and mediation is rendered 
difficult. This step cannot be taken too quickly. When 
the disappointed and exasperated Akiyama gets to Tokyo 
the tendency of his reports and recommendations, and of his 
influence, so far as it goes, cannot fail to be in the direction 
of some vigorous action against Hawaii and in opposition 
to arbitration. 

The annexation treaty news was not expected at this time, 
even by the Hawaiians, and came as a complete surprise 
and shock to Japan's representatives here. Neither Count 
Okuma in Tokyo nor Mr. Shimamura here showed any ap- 
preciation of the possibility of such an event as the speedy 
signing of a treaty. Japan's protest to the United States 
against the treaty, which, it is understood, is to be rein- 
forced by a similar protest to the Hawaiian government 
against its ratification, was also a startling surprise to every- 
body. The intimation of the possibility of such a protest 
made to me by Count Okuma in Tokio was, I was informed 
by a prominent official here, the most definite and signifi- 
cant statement on the subject made up to that time by any 
representative of Japan, the previous policy having been to 
profess complete indifference on the subject, as a matter in 
which Japan was not especially concerned. 

THE PROTEST WILL HELP ANNEXATION. 

While courteous consideration of Japan's protest may 
work some slight delay in voting upon the annexation 
treaty, the ultimate effect of the protest should be to in- 
crease the votes in favor of annexation when the time for 
action comes. It throws a light upon the real views and 
purposes of Japan in respect to the islands. It shows that 
Hawaii is to be Japanese if not American, and that annexa- 
tion is the only way to prevent its abandonment to Asia. 
It makes annexationists of those who, averse to annexation 
except as a last resort, refuse to yield to a possible enemy 



147 

control of so important a naval and strategetic point in 
rlie adjacent Pacific, and who are unwilling to -surrender' to 
the tender mercies of Japan the progressive American com- 
munity and government in these islands, and will not per- 
mit the civilized and Christian institutions of Hawaii to be 
submerged and lost in a pagan and Asiatic flood. 

Japan's political interest in the islands, frequently de- 
nied, is now clearly revealed. For many years there has 
been steady pressure, sometimes by officials, sometimes by 
individuals, to gain representation in the Hawaiian govern- 
ment for the Japanese in <the islands. A high official at 
Tokyo told me that when Kalakaua was king he promised 
such representation to the Japanese. This statement is not 
improbable. It is known that at one time Kalakaua be- 
lieved that the affinities of the Hawaiians were Asiatic 
rather than American, and sought for a matrimonial alli- 
ance between certain scions of royalty of Japan and Ha- 
waii. At the time of the revolution of 1893 the Japanese 
consul general demanded of the new government the right 
of suffrage for Japanese subjects in the islands. In Count 
Okuma's first communication to the Hawaiian government 
in the pending immigration controversy he advanced the 
view that the treaty between Japan and Hawaii placed 
the Japanese in the islands on terms of absolute equality 
with Hawaiian's :U in civil rights," as well as in the protec- 
tion of. life and property, and this proposition was construed 
by Minister Cooper as another instance of pressure for the 
right of suffrage, and reply was made on the basis of this 
construction. It should be said, however, that in his con- 
versation with riie (though not in any official correspondence) 
Mr. Shimaniura vigorously denied that any request for suf- 
frage was intended Or made under any reasonable construc- 
tion of Count Okuma's letter. 

THE JAPANESE YEARNIXG FOR HAWAII. 

There has been a constant effort by individual Japanese 
to secure the voting right. In climate, soil and wages Ha- 
waii is a paradise for the Japanese. They are in love with 
the country, and want to take possession, either through 
the, ballot box or otherwise.. Their reported talk both in 
Hawaii and in Japan, in the native newspapers and on the 
streets, is to the effect 'that Hawaii belongs and must con- 
■ tinue to belong- to them; 
:.-. When Paramount Commissioner Bfrmnt wa£ about to" or- 



148 

r 

der the American flag to be lowered and the American ma- 
rines to return to the Boston, the apprehension was felt and 
expressed that following the withdrawal of the Americans 
Japanese from their warship, the Naniwa (now again in 
Honolulu harbor), would march in and take possession. 
Rather than permit this apprehension to interfere with a 
consummation so desirable from Japan's point of view as the 
hauling down of the American flag, the Naniwa was ordered 
away from Honolulu. 

Concerning the tendencies of the Japanese on the islands, 
Admiral Walker's report of 1894 states the truth concerning 
them according to the consensus of opinion, except that it 
is thought that the result of the recent Japanese victory 
over China has been to intensify their restlessness, self-as- 
sertiveness and political ambitions. Admiral Walker said: 
"They are inclined to be turbulent; they stand together as 
a solid body, and their leaders are said to have political 
ambitions and propose to claim for their free men the right 
to vote under the conditions with which that right is granted 
to other foreigners. They are a brave people, with mili- 
tary instincts, and would fight if aroused to violence." 

RECIPROCAL DISCOURTESIES. 

A peculiarity in the quarrel between Japan and Hawaii 
is that each of the wranglers finds more cause of complaint 
in the other's manner of conduct and in alleged discourte- 
ous behavior than in the original act upon which the con- 
troversy is based. In the beginning the most heated com- 
plaints at Tokyo were not that immigrants were excluded, 
but at the manner in which it was done; at the alleged dis- 
courtesy of a change of policy and of construction of the 
law by Hawaii without the slightest notice to Japan, whose 
people were thereby injured; at the alleged brusque refusal 
of the Hawaiian foreign minister to allow counsel to see the 
rejected immigrants, and at other similar alleged rude- 
nesses. Some of the Hawaiian officials, on the other hand, 
found in the tone of Count Okuma's first communication in 
the immigration controversy an arrogance of assumption 
which would not in their opinion have been employed in 
dealing with a strong nation toward which a show of cour 
tesy was necessary. 

Another Japanese grievance against Hawaii which ri- 
valed in intensity that based upon the exclusion of immi- 
grants was the increase by the Hawaiian government of 



U9 

the duty on sake, the Japanese intoxicant, from 15 cents 
to $1 per gallon, a duty almost prohibitive. The new tariff 
goes into effect to-day, and the Peking, which brought an- 
nexation news to the satisfaction of part of the community, 
brought also, to the delight of the Japanese, a vast ship 
load of sake, which was yesterday unloaded and put through 
the custom house at a saving of nearly f 25,000 on the duty in 
force to-dav. 



TWO SUPERSENSITIVE OPPONENTS. 

Both of the contending governments are exceedingly sen- 
sitive and apprehensive lest they be treated otherwise than 
with the deference that is due to independent civilized na- 
tions. Japan is just entering the family of treaty powers, 
and is very much afraid that she will not be recognized by 
everybody as on terms of equality. She is quick to view 
as insulting any apparent discrimination against her. As 
a new-comer in a more elevated stage of international so- 
ciety she suspects every one of a disposition to snub her, to 
laugh at the cut of her garments and to criticise her man- 
ners. Hawaii is a nation, but not a power, lacking organ- 
ized army and navy, and a homogeneous, loyal population 
from which to develop military strength. To be sure, one 
of the Japanese papers said that the excluded immigrants 
were induced to return to their steamer by the firing of 
blank cartridges from the guns in the Honolulu forts. But 
unfortunately the forts and the guns in the forts of Hono- 
lulu are as blank as the alleged cartridges. 

Japan, which has won recognition as a treaty power 
mainly through recent achievements in war, is surprised 
and shocked at the "high-handed" acts and words of this 
little republic, which has neither army, navy nor fortifica- 
tions to entitle it to consideration. And the Anglo-Saxon 
republic fiercely resents what it considers the threatening 
arrogance of a Mongolian power, which has merely fur- 
nished it with coolie laborers for its sugar plantations, and 
upon that fact alone bases an effort to intimidate, dominate 
and finallv absorb it. 



TRANSFORMATION OF THE JAPANESE. 

Undoubtedly the Japanese coolies came to Hawaii as semi 
slaves, merely to labor for a contract period of servitude and 
to return to Japan. They were not recognized as among 
the responsible people of the islands any more than was 



150 

the Asiatic buffalo, imported to work in the rice fields. But 
the Old has been transformed into the New Japan, and. be- 
fore the eyes of alarmed Hawaii a similar transformation 
is working in the 25,000 Japanese within its borders, who 
seem to be preparing to say : "We work, but we are no 
longer mere coolies, slavishly lacking human rights. We 
can fight, We are of the race which has just whipped China. 
We are of the nation which has won through treaties with 
the other civilized powers recognition for its people as the 
equal of all others in the world. We like this country, and 
we are here to stay, and to increase our numbers from Ja 
pan at pleasure, with all the rights that belong to anybody 
else, and our strong home government, one of the greatest 
of the Great Powers, will protect us in these rights. If 
the islands are to have a representative form of government, 
we mean to vote, and through unlimited immigration we 
shall very soon dominate such a government. If force is to 
decide we have already enough fighting adults on the islands 
to put to flight any army that the rest of the population can 
bring against them, and we are largely increasing that num- 
ber every month." The Japanese camel has its nose and 
head in the warmth and shelter of the Hawaiian tent, and 
now threatens to enter fully, to kick out its deluded host 
and to become exclusive occupant. This coolie laborer, en- 
tering for the purpose of harmless and useful servitude, 
now threatens, the Hawaiians fear, to.be transformed into 
a ruler. 

"SUAVITER IN MODO, FORTITER IN RE.' 7 

The supersensitiveness of Japan suggests the wisdom of 
the most scrupulous care on the part of the United States 
iu the observance of all the formalities and niceties of in- 
ternational etiquette in diplomatic dealings with that na- 
tion. The United States will, of course, frame its tariff 
and decide the question of Hawaiian annexation in accord 
a nee with the dictates of its judgment, irrespective of Jap- 
anese protests, but in its method of reaching results which 
may be displeasing to Japan it can afford to go to the ex- 
treme limit of international courtesy. Japan has been and 
is a friend of the United States, and that friendship should 
not be impaired by any neglect in the observance of formali- 
ties. 

It is to be regretted that opportunities for the charge of 
discourtesy have been permitted to arise in the dealings be- 
tween Hawaii and Japan. But Hawaii believes that the 



151 

action which she has taken, maintained as she has main 
tained it, is necessary to the very existence of American 
republican government in the islands, and she holds that 
the alleged discourtesies on her part are mere pretexts of 
Japan to excuse any arrogant or forcible action by that gov 
eminent in pursuance of a fixed policy to hold the islands 
in statu quo until that date in the future, when, having 
meanwhile made the population overwhelmingly Japanese 
through immigration, she can safely absorb them. It is 
possible, however, that Hawaii could have done what was 
necessaiw in the matter without furnishing to Japan so 
many plausible pretexts for anger. 

NO HINT OF WAR IN JAPAN'S PROTEST. 

Events have fully disclosed Japan's ambition concerning 
Hawaii. She naturally deplores annexation by America, 
for that event, speedily accomplished, is the only certain pre- 
ventive of the success of her shrewd waiting game in re- 
spect to the islands. But Japan's great hopes and profound 
fears for the immediate future, as I have already suggested 
in the Star, relate to Asia and not to the mainland or islands 
of America, and all the indications are to the effect that 
nothing more than a verbal protest would be elicited from 
her by immediate annexation. 

If, however, the United States and Japan should unex 
pectedly be thrown into collision, the latter would have the 
advantage so far as immediate control of the islands is con- 
cerned. There are approximately 20,000 male adults among 
the Japanese here. Some of them served in the recent, war 
against China, many of them have received the drill of con- 
scripts. Control of the sea for a time is necessary to arm 
them fully. But the Naniwa, the Japanese protected cruiser 
in Honolulu, is through her rapid-fire guns superior in bat- 
tery to the Philadelphia, is better protected and carries more 
men. It may reasonably be assumed that our officers are 
more skillful in naval warfare, and that individually as 
fighters our men are stronger than the Japanese; but our 
fighting machine is inferior. The maxim that Providence 
favors the heavier artillery is not confined in its application 
to the land. In the close quarters of Honolulu harbor the 
guns which can throw the most metal in a minute are very 
apt to first strike a vital spot. The climate of Honolulu is 
delightful, and its harbor furnishes to-day a healthful and 
inviting station for one of the strongest of our modern war- 
ships. 



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